Hearts on Detours
by Stanrick
Summary: Dark times lie ahead, they said. Soon we will have to decide between what is easy and what is right, they said. Yeah, well. Nobody told him they were actually talking about that Yule Ball nightmare that now lies inescapably ahead with no clear answers in sight. How will he ever get out of this mess, and is there any way that doesn't involve dancing? (There isn't.)
1. Repulsion

**Disclaimer:** I may not own Harry Potter, but I totally own all these words I use. Yeah, that's right, bucko! Don't you dare steal my words! Make up your own, you lazy bum! _The, a, and_ – they're all mine! Someday, someone's going to sue me thanks to my facetious disclaimers, aren't they?

 **Introduction:** A long time ago in just about the same spot I'm sitting in right now, I began writing this silly little story right here, intending for it to become a short one-shot of no more than 10,000 words. It was once supposed to be a small bonus piece for readers that enjoyed a story of mine called Thresholds, which I published here back in 2013. Yeah. That worked out really well.

At some point I figured that any writer of Harry Potter fanfiction that takes themselves even remotely seriously should have a Yule Ball story in their repertoire. Obviously. It's basically a rite of passage in these circles, right? Am I just making this up? Nah. It's what differentiates the cool kids on the block from the pedestrian dilettantes. It's like reaching that level in Scientology where, after a couple of generous donations to their noble cause, they first reveal to you that their deeply spiritual exercise is based on the writings of a mentally unstable science fiction author. Only less insane and insidious, perhaps, but just as much fun.

So, I really just wanted to cast off the shackles of illusory originality here and write my own alternate version of the whole Yule Ball scenario, completely ignoring the fact that by now this particular part of the Harry Potter microcosm has most likely been done in every possible way in which it could either reasonably or unreasonably be done. I'm fully convinced that by now someone out there has passionately depicted Hagrid and Dobby discovering their eternal love for one another on the Yuletide dance floor while Mr. Filch is going Full Travolta on Professor Sprout. That's not what this story is going for, by the way. How many disappointed readers did I just lose?

Anyway, here we are. I won't lament how this story has basically been over two and a half years in the making because it got super messy and I got super frustrated and nothing really went the way I wanted and I gave up and I came back and eventually I somehow arrived at some sort of conclusion and finally declared the thing done and to hell with it I don't even care anymore I really just wanna write something else at this point so take it or leave it. Because that would be crazy.

Instead, let's jump right in and just see what happens. Don't tell me, though! I hate spoilers.

* * *

~•~

" _To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love."_

 _\- Jane Austen_

~•~

 **Hearts on Detours**

 **• Chapter I •**

 **Repulsion**

The year was 1994. 'Twas December, 'twas the season, and Hogwarts was entirely taken by the festive spirit of Christmas. With Christmas already being quite special an occasion among Muggle-kind in many successfully proselytized places of the world – an annual celebration of everything that is true and good in life, like love and togetherness and altruism, and also dead trees and gluttony and consumerism – it was an opportunity not to be missed to at least once experience its enchanting qualities in the richly decorated and literally magical towers, halls and common rooms of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

This one particular December, however, in this most unusual year, the whole castle was actually less concerned with Christmas itself and brimming instead – and almost palpably so – with the unabashedly youthful excitement at the imminence of another kind of occasion, which measured even by its mere frequency of occurrence already was more extraordinary than the Yuletide itself. And truly, it was far less the _tide_ that all the students' minds were so mindlessly preoccupied with and manifestly more so the _ball_ that was set to coincide with it.

Originally envisaged as a solemn declaration of solidarity between various wizarding societies from around the world whenever they would join together for another iteration of the deeply traditional and equally barbaric Triwizard Tournament, in 1994 – two hundred years after the tournament's not entirely unreasonable discontinuation – the dance was destined to deviate from its decorous medieval roots and become less of a politically relevant exercise in mutually beneficial collaboration and more of an excessive celebration of everything that can sensibly be considered great and wonderful about adolescence – like ill-advised fashion statements, rampant hormonal disarray and unbridled narcissism, as well as a volatile abundance of ethanol.

Accordingly, with Hogwarts furthermore accommodating the delegations of two additional schools from continental Europe, the castle was decidedly busier than anyone of this generation and many before it had ever seen it. The very air was sizzling with anticipation. Abounding molecules of pheromones appeared to freely float about in every corridor and class room, wafting through the air on furtive glances and secret whispers, thievishly infecting every last one of unsuspecting fools. Hopes were high in every wistful heart; doubt and insecurities were torture to minds most innocent and love was a smoke raised with the fume of sighs. It was ubiquitous. It was contagious. It was fundamentally irresistible.

The year was 1994. 'Twas December, 'twas the season, and Hogwarts was entirely taken by the feverish and possibly premature craving for everlasting romantic fulfillment. Well, maybe not quite entirely after all. There was, of course, one most stalwart mind that proudly held its ground in fierce defiance and resolute resistance against any undue exhilaration…

"Disgusting," said one Hermione Granger, all but spitting the venomous syllables into the air as she pushed past a quartet of gossipy girls right in the middle of the hallway just outside of Professor Flitwick's class room. Her two male companions trailed close behind, one of them causing a bout of ill-concealed giggles as he hastily passed the flock of females as well, a fugitive of their attention.

Hermione, well aware of what transpired in her wake, raised both the volume of her voice as well as the vitriol resonating therein as she scornfully added, "Despicable, sickening and loathsome."

"The Malfoys!" Ron exclaimed in the overeager manner of a quiz show contestant, which was all the more worthy of note considering that wizarding families usually did not really know what a quiz show was.

"Those too," she conceded glumly, then continued through gritted teeth, "but they haven't been ceaselessly grating on my nerves for the past two weeks."

The thought did not cross Harry's mind to even consider any alternative course of action besides remaining very, very quiet. His lanky friend on Hermione's opposite flank, meanwhile, had other ideas.

"It's really not that bad," Ron was either courageous or careless enough to argue.

"Not that bad?" came the inevitable riposte, and Harry immediately felt his lips twist into a secret little smile that went unnoticed by his two friends. "It's hardly possible to conduct an orderly class anymore. Everybody has their heads in the clouds all the time, talks and – I dare presume – thinks hardly about anything else and is so obsessed with this utterly vulgar and mendacious frivolity that they completely forget the importance of our education. As if that sadistic tournament wasn't already enough nonsense to interfere with the proper procedure of our term, we also get that hedonistic ritual of a tacky Yule Ball imposed upon us, which merely serves to perpetuate atavistic behavioral patterns and remind us all that we are no more than apes who most impressively have learned to dress up and dance before they mate."

" _Wow,"_ Ron soundlessly mouthed at Harry over Hermione's almost visibly fuming head. "Well, I may have understood less than half of what you just said, but the important part is that you luckily don't waste so much as a single thought on the whole affair yourself."

"Oh, zip it, Ronald," Hermione rebuked him caustically, although Harry suspected that part of her annoyance stemmed from the surprisingly apposite remark Ron had just made. "I'm in no mood for your inanities."

"Wait, does that mean there are times when you actually _are_ in the mood for my _inanigans_?" the admonished redhead asked with imperturbable mirth. "Because I'd really like to get a copy of the schedule for that."

"Ronald Bilius Weas—"

"Okay, World War I erupted for more confusing reasons," Harry quickly intervened at that point. "Could we please remain civil, at least? After all, we're really all sitting in the same boat here, remember?"

"Oh, that's right," Ron gleefully jumped at the chance to switch targets. "Guess nobody is looking forward to it less than you are, huh?"

"What do you mean?" asked Harry, a tinge of apprehension in his voice.

"Well," his dear friend most obligingly went on to explain, "sweet Herms and I are just gonna be two of the many ordinary attendees, right? Nobody will care who we go the ball with, if we can even find anyone willing to. You on the other hand are a Triwizard champion and, of course, also… you know… the hottest celebrity of the wizarding world and all that kerfuffle. You'll actually be one of the eight poor souls to open the dance, and everybody will be watching you and whoever you drag onto the dance floor with you. And that person can't just be anyone now, eh? Gotta be someone real special. I mean, imagine the headlines: _'Harry Potter goes to ball with random lass.'_ You can't do that to the tabloids, mate. Skeeter will drop dead."

While Hermione merely scoffed at the notion, the whole scenario, so vividly illustrated by his ever helpful friend, had an entirely different effect on Harry, who looked just a tad paler than a moment ago. And not having started on the tan side of the spectrum to begin with, he ended up looking like a not too distant cousin of chalk.

"Brilliant," he morosely muttered. "Thanks for the pep talk, Ron. I think I'm going to be sick."

Ron gave him an encouraging pat on the back, thereby making all amends required in his mind. "You got your eyes on anyone yet?"

"I haven't really given it much thought," Harry replied evasively, and his thoughts protested vehemently in tumultuous silence.

"Well, you gotta act quickly, though," Ron informed him matter-of-factly, "or all the good ones will be taken."

"Your perception of women is inspiring as always, Ronald," Hermione remarked, her voice imbued with unadulterated sarcasm. "Pray tell, who might be the blessed maiden you will honor with the splendor of your august company?"

"I dunno," he evaded with a shrug even as he wondered what oddly pronounced August could possibly have to do with any of it in mid-December, then looked up at her with one of his ominous brainwaves lighting up his freckled face. "How about you? You're a girl."

"Dear me!" Hermione exhaled theatrically, raising the back of her hand to her forehead in a semblance of dizziness. "I'm undeserving of such ardent adoration!"

"Come on," Ron kept right at it, half pleading and half insisting. "We could spare us a lot of trouble."

"You mean _you_ could spare _yourself_ a lot of trouble," Hermione calmly took his argument apart like a piece of paper, overtly unimpressed. "I don't have to ask anybody. In accordance with age-old tradition I will for once gladly clad myself in feminine passivity."

"And what if nobody's gonna ask _you?"_ Ron snapped at her, and Harry cringed even before his notoriously headless friend had finished his faux pas.

"Then all of us will have what we desire," Hermione declared with an edge, and regarding Ron with a most factitious smile she added with pointed finality, "Thank you very much for your noble offer, Ronald, but I think I shall prefer dignity as my companion. Regardless of our destination."

And with that she turned on her heels and strode off, her bouncing locks of hair and her billowing robes below perfectly accentuating her most apparent indignation.

"Yeah, well, good luck dancing with that!" Ron called out after her, paused and then scoffed. "Dignity," he mumbled disparagingly. Shaking his head he turned to face Harry and was dismayed to find plain disapproval looking back at him. "What?" he asked gruffly, a first hint of guilt creeping onto his barely defiant features. "She's the one who doesn't know what she wants! Why would not being asked out on a date even matter to her if she doesn't want to go anyway?"

"Well," Harry exhaled on a troubled breath, "you know Hermione."

"Do I?"

"She's complicated."

"Oh, that much I do know," Ron said with a decisive nod. "I might be stupid, but I'm not smart."

Laughing despite himself Harry resumed walking along the hallway, shaking his head at his most incorrigible friend. "What about you, though?" he asked after a few steps as Ron caught up with him with even fewer steps. "You'll have to ask somebody, too. Say what you will, but being the first Weasley in known history to not attend a Yule Ball at Hogwarts would leave a blemish on your family line you'd never be able to rectify. You might just end up being disinherited."

"Oh, the riches I'd miss out on," Ron lamented with a thespian hand on his chest. "I'm still weighing my options, though. By that I mean that I'm still trying to figure out who the one girl is that would be either whimsical or desperate enough to say yes. Hey, you could ask someone for me!"

"Right," came Harry's flat reply.

"No, seriously," a freshly enthused Ron insisted. "I'll bet you a hundred Galleons that lots of girls who would laugh at me if I asked them myself would be willing to do it as a favor to you. _Harry Potter's Best Mate_ sounds a lot better than _That Weird Weasley Bloke With The More Popular Brothers_. Damn, my options just quadrupled from, like, one to four."

"Honestly, Ron. You know that fine line between self-deprecation and self-loathing? You're way past it."

"Hey, I'm just a realist."

"Whoa, don't let Hermione hear that one. You'll give her a heart attack."

"So you won't do it?" Ron asked with tremendous sadness and a corresponding set of puppy eyes. "Not even for me?"

"You know what?" Harry replied as soon as he finished rolling his non-puppy eyes at his friend's best attempt at emotional blackmail. "I will. I will actually do that for you. But only if that one girl whimsical enough to say yes turns out to be whimsical enough to say no when you ask her yourself. After that, I'll walk straight up to Fleur Delacour and tell her to go to the ball with you, because I was an awesome toddler once and everybody has to do as I say."

"Hah! You got yourself a deal, good sir," Ron declared as he readjusted his shirt, properly chuffed with himself. "You just put your Galleons on a lame Thestral."

With his face instinctively seeking solace in his palm, Harry merely shook his head once more where all words failed.

~•~

In the later afternoon hours, when the last class of the day lay behind the positively drained students and many of them were looking forward to some much needed rest and recreation, Harry parted ways with a rather flummoxed Ron at the bottom of the stairs to Professor Trelawney's heavily perfumed realm of immensely important nonsense to make for the library instead, where he had agreed to meet Hermione for an even more needed studying session for their upcoming last test prior to Christmas, courtesy of one Professor Severus Snape.

Strangely enough, Harry was even in too good of a mood to question his decision to choose the library over its numerous appealing alternatives, and thus went his way quite jauntily indeed. The library, at least according to Hermione – who frankly appeared to be the only student outside of Ravenclaw to think of it as a place of reverence – likely was the last refuge from the Yule Ball frenzy the whole castle was rife with like a bad case of the flu, and that seemed like a valid enough point in its favor in Harry's mind.

He was just a few steps away from the entrance when he unexpectedly heard his name being called out, and he stopped in mid-stride and wheeled around to look for its source. Regrettably, that source turned out to be an obnoxiously dashing young man with a constant smile plastered onto his pretty face going by the name of Cormac McLaggen, the only Gryffindor student who addressed Harry with his surname and now approached him far too briskly for his taste.

"Ah, Potter," he said good-naturedly as always, oblivious to whatever flash of annoyance might or might not have flickered over Harry's features at the mere sight of him. "You got a minute?"

"Sure," was Harry's terse reply, half word half sigh, and it was quite the opposite of what in truth he would have very much preferred to say. "What's up?"

"Just need to ask you a quick question is all," Cormac answered with a casual shrug of the shoulder.

Harry hesitated a second and looked at him askance. "As long as you aren't asking me to be your date for the ball, I think I'll be fine."

"Funny," said Cormac, and he flashed his white teeth in a broad grin, which for some reason brought the image of sunglasses to Harry's mind. "You're a funny chap, Potter."

The funny chap faintly heaved a sigh. "I have my moments."

"Well, anyway," Cormac smoothly went right back to business, "It's actually Granger I'm wondering about, you know?"

"She's funny too, yeah," was Harry's most immediate response in the second it took for some proper confusion with both the question and his answer to set in. "Wait, what?"

"I meant regarding the Yule Ball," McLaggen somewhat perplexedly clarified, and when no such clarification seemed to reach the expression on Harry's face he added, "As a date?"

Harry blinked. "For… whom?" he lamely asked, his eyes narrowed, and to his increasing mystification Cormac gave a short guffaw at that.

"For me, obviously," he then declared with an almost condescendingly pitiful look on his face, as if he had to explain a multiplication table to a hopelessly overwhelmed child.

"B-but…" Harry struggled not for numbers but for words, "aren't you usually into… different kinds of girls?"

"Well, it's not like I'm planning on settling down anytime soon," Cormac explained naturally, a complacent smirk never leaving the corners of his lips. "We're still young, after all. Gotta try things out, right? There are all sorts of flavors in the world. Why pass up on any?"

"Right," said Harry with his tongue moving in slow motion even as he almost unnoticeably shook his head a little, feeling annoyingly dazed as his blood seemed to rush through his veins with a little more force for some obscure reason.

"So," Cormac's voice disrupted and in no way mended his inner disarray. "She still available?"

Harry needed a second to find his brain's capacity for coherence. "Why would you ask _me_ that?"

"Come on, Potter," McLaggen prompted him in an overly amicable fashion. "You of all people should understand. There's a certain reputation the likes of us gotta maintain, right? You got yours, I got mine. Mine corresponds mostly with the affairs of the fairer sex, if you take my meaning. I don't get the push from anyone. Ever. Mostly because, you know, I'm me, but sometimes you gotta make sure beforehand. Scout your options. Work some angles." He gave Harry's shoulder a playful bump with his fist. "It's a game, Potter, and you either know how to play or you're out."

"I think I prefer Quidditch," Harry mused almost a bit obtusely, then actually winced a little when Cormac laughed out loud yet again.

"So funny," he said with another toothy grin, giving Harry an accompanying clap on the back. Things were getting a tad too touchy-feely here. "What about it, then? She got a date or not?"

Something about that gave him pause, though in retrospect Harry couldn't have said what conscious thought may have gone through his head in that peculiar moment, or if any at all.

"As a matter of fact," he then heard himself utter, "she… does."

"She does?" There appeared something akin to disappointment on Cormac's features, although it was diluted with a greater part of surprise and therefore not easily discerned. "Really?"

"Definitely, yah," Harry further reinforced the spontaneous lie, and he had to push it past a considerable lump that had suddenly formed in his throat.

"Damn. Spent too much time weighing my admittedly numerous options, I suppose," said McLaggen, and whatever kind of regret might have lingered on his chiseled features was subsequently – and with instant effect – replaced with another front cover material smile. "That's what you get from having too many, am I right? So who's the lucky bloke?"

"A person," Harry clumsily replied, unable to decide whether he was more confused by Cormac's words or his face, or the astounding rate at which both seemed to completely change directions. His entirely unplanned lie didn't make things any clearer, either. "I don't know," he then spluttered. "She hasn't told me. I wasn't there. So how would I know? I wouldn't. I couldn't. And therefore I don't."

That Cormac McLaggen perked one dubious eyebrow at that could probably be counted in his favor, as little of that as there generally was. "But you're sure?"

"Absolutely," Harry answered thinly, barely able to avoid choking on his own voice. "Sorry."

"Oh, well," Cormac replied with a shrug, then regarded him with another perfect smile, of which he seemed to have a well-nigh infinite supply. "Plenty of squids in the lake, am I right?"

"I'm pretty sure there's just the one, actually."

"Really? Well, forget about the squids then. I'll find me another bird."

If such confusing allusions to animals both metaphorical and literal had been the only baffling part of the encounter, Harry may have been able to shrug it all off without so much as a second thought, yet as Cormac McLaggen left him with a wink taken straight from an aftershave commercial, he remained transfixed to the spot for a suitable moment of general disorientation. Once he finished wondering who, what and where he was, and questionable results notwithstanding, he shook himself back into the realm of self-awareness and finally entered the library, which at the very least he remembered as the destination he had intended to reach before the world had decided to turn topsy-turvy on him.

Finding Hermione, at least to Harry, was like determining the cardinal directions on a cloudless day: no more than a matter of when to look where. Which of course, as could very well be argued, is the very essence of finding anyone at any time. Being in the library, Harry purposefully made his way towards the spot where he had no doubt he would find her, and when he finally reached the alcove at the end of one of the many aisles between the old dark bookshelves that almost reached up to the vaulted ceiling, he unsurprisingly found his expectation fulfilled. Only when he slid down on the cushioned bench across from her did she look up at him for a second, then threw a quick glance at her strikingly un-magical watch before fixating him once again.

"You're late," she declared with almost perfect sternness, yet Harry had no trouble discerning that she was merely teasing him.

"Like two minutes," he pointedly said.

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored, hm?"

"Or of those who are left alone."

"Who held you up?" Hermione asked. "Groupies?"

"Not quite," Harry more or less subtly answered without actually answering, then swiftly skipped ahead. "So what exactly did you have in mind for today?"

"We could work on that Potions homework first and go from there," she offered pleasantly, and Harry tried to suppress a smile while watching her undisguised eagerness at the prospect of imminent academic joy. "It's all relevant for the test on Thursday, anyway."

"Sure," he acceded, and as they got to work between all the scattered tomes and parchments Harry eventually was able to mostly forget about any surreal incidents and Yule-related imbroglio. Working with Hermione naturally demanded a degree of focus and attention that made it virtually impossible to nurture any stray thoughts at all. There were but a few rare moments when Harry caught himself looking at her when her own eyes were fixed on quill and paper, and the strangest touch of guilt and contemplation pushed into his conscience until he shook himself and got back to his reading material.

For quite a while they exchanged nary a word unrelated to the work at hand, barring the occasional jest and good-natured banter. Hermione was strict when it came to studying, for sure, but she wasn't draconian – resembling, perhaps, a younger version of Professor McGonagall. For some inexplicable reason, however, and despite his profound admiration for the Head of House Gryffindor, Harry decided that he preferred not to think of Hermione in that particular way.

At some point, when Harry was busy scribbling away on his parchment and Hermione merely waiting for him to finish a particular set of notes she had asked him to write down, his concentration suddenly got interrupted when he heard her huff in disapproval. Half expecting to find her glowering at him for some mistake he was as yet unaware he had made, he was puzzled to see her looking into an entirely different direction.

"Unbelievable," she muttered under her breath, shaking her head with her brow furrowed deeply with wrinkles of contempt. "Not even the library is safe from this pedestrian charade anymore."

Harry turned his head over his shoulder to follow her icy glare and quickly found a group of laughing and applauding students, a boy and a girl holding hands and beaming from ear to ear in their midst. Another dancing couple set for the ball, it seemed. Harry watched for no more than three seconds, then pursed his lips and turned back to Hermione, who still appeared to be busy trying to wordlessly cast the Killing Curse on the unsuspecting entirety of mankind.

"You really don't like that whole thing, huh?" Harry asked her with some well-measured caution.

"Oh – no, no. You mistake my meaning," Hermione replied and briefly looked at him before switching her attention back to the celebratory scene. "It's not that I don't like it. I completely, utterly despise the very idea of the whole concept with the searing hatred that burns eternally in the deepest pits of my scornful heart."

"Right," Harry remarked with a half-contained chortle. "I'm glad it's nothing to be worried about, then."

Hermione likewise answered with a chuckle of her own and at last averted her eyes from the gradually dispersing group of teenagers with a final shake of the head. As their shared laughter subsided, she ended up scrutinizing him intently with a pensive look on her face, which he was entirely unaware of as he once more perused his notes.

"You don't agree with me, though, do you?" she asked him curiously. "I mean, not with my slightly embellished performance there, obviously, but not even with the underlying sentiment?"

"Well," Harry went straight for the most obvious evasive maneuver in the English language and also scratched the back of his neck with his usual aplomb to properly round it off. "I… I don't know…"

"Wow," Hermione breathed with her eyebrows flicking up to red alert. "This is worse than I thought. You don't agree with me at all!"

"I wouldn't say _that_ ," he quickly rectified. "I get where you're coming from – I do. And I seriously doubt that anyone could possibly be more horrified at the prospect of having to dance with another human being right in front of a whole bunch of other human beings than I am."

"Not even Neville?"

"You should see that traitorous bugger," Harry complained quite in earnest, vigorously shaking his head. "He's going all James Bond on us, putting on his ridiculously shiny dancing shoes every night and practicing his steps in the middle of our sodding dorm to Brahms and Tchaikovsky like this is his one true destiny or something."

Hermione puckered her lips in a rather unsuccessful attempt to hide her smile at the mental images his words evoked. "That awkward moment when Neville is suddenly Gryffindor's most suave bachelor."

"Tell me about it," said he. "It's depressing and inspiring at the same time, and since we can't decide which one outweighs the other we haven't kicked him out yet."

She laughed at that, then dared to confess, "I'm afraid I can sympathize with him, though. The variables might be somewhat different, but in my dorm room I'm actually the odd one out, since I am its only inhabitant who doesn't join the sophisticated fashion talks, the in-depth analysis of the school's male specimens and the latest, profoundly intriguing meat market gossip."

"You _don't?"_ Harry dramatically feigned surprise. "I don't even know you anymore!"

She rolled her eyes at him in response and twirled her quill between her fingers as she amusedly waited for him to finish laughing. Eventually he cleared his throat and looked at her expectantly.

"You didn't fully answer my question, though," she then pointed out circumspectly enough. "And granted, I may have contributed to that with my Neville excursion, but I'd still like to hear your thoughts on the matter, if that's okay."

Harry leaned back with a sigh and looked up through the high-arching window that revealed a grayish scenery characterized too much by autumn's persistence and winter's reluctance. Given how this was literally the most magical place in Britain, however, the hope for a White Christmas yet to come perhaps did not exclusively depend on meteorological reliability.

"Well," Harry began once more, "I… again, I understand. I really do. It's just that I probably don't concern myself quite as much with how shallow Pansy Parkinson and Lavender Brown may be, or how obsessed some of these people are with this kind of thing. Mainly because… I'm not. Yes, it's a pretty silly affair, all things considered. But then again, so is Quidditch. And maybe – and please don't kill me in my sleep for saying this – maybe even our education here is a bit silly from a certain perspective. I mean, the only thing that matters is what you as an individual make of any of it, right? Whatever you do, it's yours to make it meaningful and important, even if nobody else cares. And even if there are a thousand ignoble philistines defiling it with their unworthy minds."

Hermione ambiguously scrunched up her face at his best impression of herself, a justified pout on her lips and the smile tucked away therein glinting in her brown irises. He fleetingly regarded her with an impish, lopsided smile of his own, then continued more seriously again.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is… the thing itself is just a stupid dance, right? People getting drunk, awkwardly flailing their limbs about and trying to exchange some bodily fluids. Doesn't seem too enticing when you look at it like that. Well, for some it probably does. Anyway, I'm sure we both know that it's quite safe to assume that somewhere in this place there are at least a couple of people who have someone they genuinely like and that they'd hope to enjoy this slightly trivial yet somewhat uncommon occasion with. And as for me?"

He paused for a moment, avoiding her attentive gaze. "Well, I'm afraid I too could hypothetically imagine circumstances under which it could potentially all become… sufferable, at the very least. Enjoyable, possibly. And maybe even memorable." He paused again, cleared his throat and added, "Hypothetically speaking, of course."

With the sound of his voice subsiding, there passed a couple of seconds of silence between them that were emphasized all the more by the already subdued ambiance of the library and their rather secluded spot therein.

"I see," Hermione finally stated, her voice small as she apparently deemed it necessary to neatly readjust a pile of books on the scuffed and sturdy tabletop. The sudden change in her demeanor, subtle as it was, alarmed Harry a bit.

"Did I say something wrong?" he was quick to inquire. "Should I repeat the part about the philistines?"

Even though she wasn't looking directly at him anymore, he could still make out the hint of a smile playing around the corners of her lips that he was instantly relieved to see.

"No, no. That's okay," she assured him somewhat meekly. "I'm just surprised, that's all."

"Surprised?" Harry asked in a not un-surprised fashion. "What about, exactly?"

"I just didn't know how you felt about this kind of thing," Hermione explained. "And now that I think about it, I realize that's probably because we hardly ever talk about this particular kind of thing."

"Wha—what kind of thing?" he asked her with no sign of comprehension on his face.

"You know. The thing," she replied with an impatient gesture of her hands, though it was hard to tell whether her impatience was solely or even primarily directed at him. "Interpersonal… things. Dates, relationships, Yule Balls. The things we've been talking about for the past five minutes."

"Oh," he mumbled. "Those things."

They both nodded their heads in unison with their lips tightly pressed together, each of them looking anywhere but in the other's general direction, and as the seconds passed with their usual disregard for all transient human affairs, Harry began to feel the contemplative kind of silence that lingered in the air around them slowly but surely change into its socially awkward cousin.

"So who is she?" Hermione suddenly blurted out, therewith turning the arising awkwardness into utter confusion on Harry's part.

"Huh?" he accordingly asked in the manner of someone who is asked what the square root of 4 is after being woken from some vaguely pleasant dream in the middle of the night, the problem not being the square root itself, but the fact that he didn't even comprehend the question as he was still wondering why he wasn't on a spaceship battling Klingons anymore.

"The girl that's on your mind," Hermione tried to help him along, yet when there was no indication of the bedlam written all over his features going anywhere, she further expounded, "With the way you talked about it I can only assume there's someone particular you have in mind, because just a couple of weeks ago I remember you were strongly considering the possibility of leaving the country for good only to evade the looming embarrassment of the Yule Ball. I do not at all recall a heartfelt speech about how special people can make ordinary occasions very memorable."

"I–I didn't say _very_ ," Harry most impressively grasped for the proverbial straw. "I said _maybe_."

The look Hermione gave him made his pitiful straw snap between his fingers before he could even truly hold onto it, which really was a pity since it had seemed like such a nice straw at first.

"Come on," she urged him not unkindly. "You know your secret is safe with me. I generally don't talk to people. Who's the lucky girl Harry Potter has set his sights on?"

"I didn't–there isn't–it's–it's not," Harry helplessly stammered in something akin to Morse code, defensively hunching his shoulders and crossing his arms in front of his chest. Then he looked at her and thought he saw a semblance of disappointment half-hidden in the lines of her face, and fearing to be the cause of it he heaved a heavy sigh and with another shrug of his shoulders uttered… something.

"Chuh—"

"Cho Chang?" Hermione complemented on the spot, then hastily rattled on, "Well, how many Chos are there here, really? Of course Cho Chang. Peculiar name though, don't you think? I'm pretty sure Cho is actually a Japanese forename, mostly, while Chang is a surname most common in continental Asia, like China and maybe Thailand, I think. Anyway, she seems like a nice person and I'm pretty sure I've seen her giving you the eye on more than one occasion, although that might be said for more than half of the female populace of this school and probably even a boy or two. The same could be said for Gilderoy Lockhart, as I recall, although I really, really hope for different reasons. You think he's still bonkers?"

The rapid blinking of Harry's eyes was the only visible symptom of his brain feeling as if it had been twisted into something with a striking resemblance to a balloon poodle. The audible one came when his lips appeared to move of their own accord and mumbled something that perplexingly enough sounded a lot like, "Japa—japachina?"

"Oh, look how late it's gotten," Hermione exclaimed with a glance at her watch. "You'll be late for that Quidditch scrimmage with Cedric and the lot that you've been looking forward to, if you don't hurry. Go on. It's okay. I'll take care of these."

His eyes followed the motion of her hands as she erratically gestured towards all the books and parchments they had used for studying, and inadvertently emerald green found chocolate brown and the two remained interlocked for one almost everlasting second that came dangerously close to revealing something intangible. They both averted their eyes in the same moment, however, and the unknown was lost once more.

"You… you're sure?" Harry asked her uncertainly.

"Yes, of course," she replied with almost inconspicuous levity. "I'll probably do a little more reading, anyway. You go ahead and get yourself some Quidditch. Merlin knows it's bad enough that you don't get to play a regular season this year."

"Right," said Harry, absently moving his fingers across his forehead. "Okay." He stood up rather abruptly, then fleetingly looked down at what little he could see of her averted face. "I'll, uh… I'll see you later, then. Right?"

He saw her nod with half a simper on her lips as her eyes briefly flickered up towards him without ever fully meeting his. "Have fun," she wished him in a tight voice.

Reluctantly he left the alcove and walked away along the aisle through the shadows of the shelves. Only when he reached its end did he turn around to look back, and he left with the image of Hermione, sitting motionlessly in her place with the knuckles of one hand pressed against her lips and her eyes gazing blankly into nothingness, leaving a lasting imprint on his troubled and conflicted heart.

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Jane Austen:_ The quotation placed ahead of the story stems from the third chapter of _Pride & Prejudice._

 _Sneaky Shakespeare:_ I snuck a little Romeo into the introductory passage, specifically his "Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs" right from the first scene of the first act. Almost got away with it, didn't I?

 _Punctuality is the virtue of the bored:_ This little tidbit is a quotation from English author Evelyn Waugh.

 _Klingons:_ With the rekindled popularity of _Star Trek_ , I may not even have to mention it, but this one's a reference to that. It's the one without the lightsabers.


	2. Convolution

**• Chapter II •**

 **Convolution**

Care for Magical Creatures was one of those especially special classes that had already produced multiple unforgettable memories for Harry: flying across the clear and even water of the lake on the back of a majestic hippogriff; Draco Malfoy getting his comeuppance for his habitual arrogance; Hagrid being all eager and excited about his new teaching responsibilities. Sadly, though, all those things had happened in their very first lesson over a year ago, and after that incident with Buckbeak and Malfoy, which – thanks to Draco's excessive theatrics and his father's hereditary influence – had threatened to cost the hippogriff his life and Hagrid the position as a teacher as quickly and unexpectedly as he had gotten it, the gentle half-giant had never quite regained his confidence, and the levels of excitement generally to be expected from the class were henceforth comparable to those of a small town petting zoo.

Thus, when Harry first beheld the weird fuzzy balls of hair that Hagrid procured from a small but sturdy wooden box as two dozen pairs of eyes dulled by unbridled euphoria looked on, he mentally prepared himself for another wild ride of a lesson and tried very hard not to audibly join the multiple sighs of mild disappointment that were quietly exhaled around him. He wasn't exactly expecting him to let loose an Irish dullahan at them, what with the headless horseman's rather inconvenient habit of using human spines as whips and all that morally questionable stuff they were wont to conduct with them, but sometimes he found himself wishing his big old friend hadn't forgotten that there were a lot of potentially interesting intermediates between a homicidal maniac on horseback and the oh so magical equivalent to a hamster.

"Now, these little things 'ere are called, well, erm…" Hagrid clumsily began his mandatory introductory speech, then scratched the thick stubble on his cheeks with one hand as he pensively mustered the three jittering balls of fur that looked well-nigh marooned in his other massive hand. "They have that complicated Latin textbook name I'm sure yer all are real excited t'learn, but since it's probably all the same t'them, I usually just call'em Fluffballs."

He looked sternly at his class then, and warningly added, "Don't let yerselves be fooled, though. They might not look like much of a threat, but they can be nasty little buggers when yeh don't treat'em right an' proper. Got teeth like push pins on'em. Very small push pins, sure, but mighty sharp as well. Can cut right through human skin. Sometimes. And Muggles appear t'be allergic t'them fer some reason. They can't see'em, o'course, but when yeh catch a Muggle sneezing in the woods, chances are one of'em Fluffballs might be t'blame. Special thing about'em is they're very sensitive t'all kinds of magical energy and they, erm… they… help me out 'ere, 'mione, will yeh?"

Hermione promptly straightened herself up. "The _Magimus Versicapillus_ , or Fluffball, is known to assimilate certain properties of whatever source of magical energy it's in close proximity to or ideally in direct contact with," she came to his aid with both diligence and a healthy dose of elation, "especially, but not exclusively, if said source is organic in nature, adopting some of its physical characteristics as well as a semblance of its disposition, its mood and various behavioral tendencies. The _Versicapillus_ appears to absorb magical energy and convert it into heat, which it will consequently radiate aplenty. The exact workings of either one of these distinctive abilities are not yet fully understood and remain the subject of further research."

"Aye," Hagrid agreed with a nod, regarding Hermione with a pleased and grateful smile. "Like this."

With that he dropped one of the three brown balls of fluff from his own hand into Ron's much smaller one, who eyed the little creature with something akin to lethargic skepticism. It took a few strikingly uneventful moments before its fuzzy fur began to change colors, gradually turning from the dark earthy-brown that was most prominently displayed in Hagrid's enormous beard into the trademark Weasley ginger that vibrantly adorned the head of the lanky person now holding the rodent in the palm of his pale hand.

"Wicked," Ron remarked tonelessly.

"Yes, yes," Hagrid eagerly replied, perfectly oblivious to the redhead's sarcasm. "But no wicked thoughts now, or the bugger'll make yeh feel'em alright."

"Well," said Ron, "as long as it doesn't turn out to actually be an adult man who has spent years sharing my bed, I think I'll consider myself lucky."

His ears turned almost as red as his hair when he realized that all but three people around him had no idea what he was actually talking about, and that the remaining twenty may or may not have begun to seriously question his sexual orientation, or perhaps just his sanity. Which either way was really the last thing he needed a couple of weeks before the Yule Ball.

Hagrid elegantly chose this moment to clear his throat, which always was a sound more similar to a succession of thunderclaps rather than anything an average human throat could produce. "Anyhow," he then said, "everybody come 'ere now and I'll hand yeh all one or two magic… mouse… Fluffballs of yer own. I'm sure yeh all appreciate their warmth in this kind o' weather, but yer all expected t'make notes about their changes and what they do an' all that, o'course, so study'em carefully."

Half an hour later Neville asked what he was supposed to write down when all his Fluffball did was cower down and tremble in fear as it nervously eyed the ominous world around it. It had taken the two flamboyantly silver-blond-haired Fluffballs in the hands of Draco Malfoy less than five minutes to start trying to kill each other after inconclusively trying to establish dominance over one another by attempting to gain the necessary high ground from where to look down at the other. When Hagrid noticed Malfoy taking bets from his fellow Slytherins on which one of the two would survive the mortal struggle, he broke the group up and left Malfoy with no more than a single Fluffball to study, which then – to the undisguised disgust of its observer – rolled up into a fetal position and quietly whimpered away.

The Fluffballs of Malfoy's two obsequious lackeys hardly fared any better. Crabbe's little rodent had eaten so excessively much and quickly grown so obscenely obese it had eventually lost its ability to stand on its four tiny feet, let alone walk, and as a consequence was helplessly rolling about from one chubby hand to the other. Goyle's intellectual counterpart, meanwhile, had trouble properly doing anything at all, and when it seemed to have forgotten how to breathe, Hagrid hastily intervened once more to save the poor creature from its imminent death by stupidity.

Seamus Finnigan's magical mice had developed a knack for making their small pieces of food explode into even tinier bits, which confused the little things greatly, while the one in the hands of Lavender Brown somehow managed to look like the blond and long-haired rodent equivalent of a hopelessly conceited princess, constantly busying itself with grooming and even foregoing nutrition to continue doing so, which a repeatedly sighing Lavender naturally observed with the saccharine delight of someone blissfully immune to the follies of genuine reflection. Next to her, Parvati Patil's two Fluffballs had unfortunately managed to acquire her rather substantial and barely restrained musophobia and were now positively afraid of each other and, in fact, themselves.

Harry, Ron and Hermione, meanwhile, were sitting on a large old tree stump with their idle quills and their hardly used notebooks scattered around them and the fluffy subjects of their more or less focused study in their hands. When even Hermione's enthusiasm waned before a task could be considered thoroughly completed you knew something was rotten in the school of Hogwarts.

"What am I supposed to observe here, exactly?" a weary Ron complained as he listlessly regarded the two rather phlegmatic-looking ginger rodents in his hand. "They aren't doing anything. They're just lying there with their ridiculous fur color. I think they grew a bit longer, so now they look less like hairy miniature Quaffles and more like weird four-legged eggs. But they aren't doing anything. They're just dossing about."

There was a look of silent understanding exchanged between his two neighbors that went unnoticed by him, and smiles were fought down with limited success.

"Have you tried food?" Hermione then asked with a lilt of innocence in her voice.

"You got some?" Ron asked her in return. "It's been almost two hours since breakfast. I'm starving!"

"Not for you," she chided him with a frown, then tossed him a small leather pouch. "For them!"

"Oh," was Ron's plainly disappointed comment on that.

As their friend went about his newfound business, Harry and Hermione redirected their attention back to their own two Fluffballs in all their moderately exciting glory. Harry's not only had the raven black color of his hair, but also its less tolerable feature of being messy beyond all mitigation. It didn't wear glasses, though, and since the thick fur covered the entirety of its body apart from its two black button eyes and its four feet, it was impossible to tell if it had a scar on its forehead or not, or whether something like a forehead was even distinguishable on what was basically a ball-shaped mouse without much of a tail. They looked more like fat hamsters, really.

Hermione's Fluffball was expectedly brown-colored and indisputably the most active of the four in the hands of the three friends, curiously exploring the endless expanse of Hermione's extremities and in so far fearlessly uncompromising in its thirst for discovery as Hermione constantly had to switch and turn her hands around to keep the eager investigator from simply falling off. After having done that with unconscious dexterity for more than half an hour, its initial novelty had eventually begun to wear off, leaving Hermione somewhat dissatisfied with her rather meager results.

Her dissatisfaction gradually grew into latent indignation as she sulkily observed that the hamster-shaped mouse, allegedly adapting some of _her_ characteristics, seemed to be incapable of realizing it had covered the entirety of the area her hands offered multiple times over and there was nothing left to learn, rendering its continuing endeavors not only redundant but alarmingly idiotic. That Harry's black Fluffball kept watching the futile antics of her own with what she could only assume was the rodent version of an almost pitiful look of sympathy did nothing to lessen her increasing frustration.

"This doesn't even taste half bad," Ron's voice disrupted their morose observations, and their heads simultaneously swirled around to face their friend, who had one hand buried deep in the pouch while chewing away on something audibly crunchy and altogether unquestionable in its identity. When he eventually became aware of their incredulous gazes on him, he looked back and forth between their two equally disapproving expressions and defensively hunched his shoulders. "What?"

"Ew," Hermione pointedly remarked.

"Seriously," Harry concisely underlined.

Even as Ron began justifying his wayward eating habits, saying something about cereal and dried fruits and ushering in a new age of culinary discovery, the two turned their attention back to the two magical rodents in their hands, once again mutely staring at them for a while.

"Well," Harry said at some point, "at least yours is doing _something_. If I didn't know any better, I'd say mine looks a little depressed."

Hermione quietly observed him and his somewhat impassive mouse for a moment, and he was completely unaware of it for the contemplative moment's whole duration.

With a sigh she said, "Better depressed than stupid, wouldn't you agree?" And she raised her hands a little towards Harry, where her own Fluffball was still running unremittingly into one and the same direction. Harry looked over and smiled.

"I don't think she's stupid at all," he opined. "Just… immeasurably passionate, driven by an unquenchable thirst for truth and knowledge. You know, like a certain, singular someone I know."

That singular someone had a certain trouble keeping the blush from lighting up her cheeks at that.

"Well, that's a—that's a very flattering and possibly fallacious way of describing _this_ ," she said as she kept shifting her hands to keep the ground under the little fellow's eager feet.

Just when Harry was about to say something in return, another person's voice forestalled him.

"Apologies," it deeply spoke in a thick Eastern European accent, and both Harry and Hermione looked up to find none other than Viktor Krum standing right in front of them, who apparently joined the Slytherins' classes on occasion, though Harry wondered why he would even bother with fourth year considering his age. "I don't mean to disturb," Viktor went on, pronouncing every word with both care and effort, "but if it is at all possible, I would really like to speak with you."

"Uh, sure," Harry replied somewhat perplexedly once he realized Viktor was actually not looking at Hermione. So far he had hardly exchanged two sentences with the Durmstrang champion and rising Quidditch world star, but he supposed one had to start somewhere in order to change something like that.

An awkward moment of silence ensued, however, in which everybody seemed to wait for everybody else to do something they expected while no two expectations were congruent with one another. With the exception of Ron, of course, who was just sitting there staring at Krum with his eyes round as saucers, as if the young Bulgarian were an apparition descended from the heavens into earthly realms. It was safe to say he had still not quite adjusted to having his idol walk amongst mere mortals.

"Maybe… a bit away?" Krum then haltingly asked with a sidelong glance in Ron's direction, his demeanor as diffident as it could only be witnessed whenever he was not flying high over a Quidditch pitch with inimitably marvelous amounts of speed and precision.

Harry rapidly blinked a few times until understanding set in. "Of course," he hastily gave his consent, immediately jumping to his feet. "Will you keep an eye on this melancholy friend of mine?" he asked Hermione, and when she nodded with a smile he gently dropped his Fluffball into her open hands, thanked her and hesitantly walked off into a confusingly random direction.

"Hermione," Viktor Krum then said his farewell along with a deferential bow taken straight from the decorum of days of yore, so old-fashioned it should almost appear fossilized, then turned away to follow Harry, leaving Hermione to struggle with her facial temperature once more. This was quickly turning into one of the stranger days of the year for her, and considering it had only been a couple of months since she had used a Time-Turner to save the lives of a man and a hippogriff condemned to die, that was indeed saying something.

Harry and Viktor, meanwhile, slowed to a halt a couple of steps away from the rest of the class and out of earshot as per intent, though some curious and often suspicious glances certainly reached them nevertheless.

"I spoke to Mr. Hagrid first," Viktor informed him, causing no small degree of bemusement in Harry's mind at the utterance of the outright otherworldly _Mr. Hagrid_ , "and I will not take away much of your time, I hope."

"Oh, that's fine," Harry casually assured him. "We aren't exactly reinventing the wheel over there."

Viktor's thin lips twitched into some approximation of a smile, and Harry could not help but think that smiling generally did not appear to come quite as easy to the reserved young man as flying. Away from the Quidditch pitch he always appeared to have a vague and impalpable somberness about him, and a sort of detachment from all those around him, even – and maybe most of all – when he seemed to be at the very center of their attention, which given his fame was not exactly the rarest of occurrences.

"So," Viktor then began, "I wanted to ask you a question."

Harry gave a slow nod in response, then, and with a quicker nod, said, "Okay," to encourage him further to continue. Viktor opened his mouth as if to speak, yet aborted the attempt before any sound rolled off his tongue.

"Apologies," he said once more. "This is a bit difficult to me. Because of the language, too. This would be much more easy in my mother's tongue. For me. Not for you, I think."

"Sorry, my Bulgarian is a bit rusty," Harry quipped. "Your English isn't bad at all, though. Honestly."

"Yes, well," Viktor answered unsurely, "maybe I know the words, because I look a lot of them up and try to learn every day a bit to keep up with Hermione, but I still can only hope not to be rude. I'm not sure how to be very polite in your language and your country."

Harry couldn't entirely suppress a chuckle at that, and he hoped Viktor wouldn't take it the wrong way. "I'm not sure if any native person since the Victorian era has been more polite than you are being right now," he told him, sincere even in his jest. "I mean it. Just ask me, whatever it is."

"Okay. I will try," said Viktor, then took another moment to focus his thoughts and gather his determination. A deep breath of the cool December air appeared to help him along. "I have come here to ask you… a very personal question, I'm afraid. I do not want to in—intrude? I do not know if it is acceptable for me to ask you this, but I have a good intention and if it is not so, please just tell me."

Again Harry nodded to urge him on, though not impatiently. This was slowly but surely reaching the suspense levels of a Hitchcock movie. Luckily Harry was not in the shower right now, which would probably have been a little awkward under current circumstances for more than one reason.

"Are you—" Viktor tried, then shook his head and started over, "I am wondering, is there anything between you and Hermione Granger?"

The entirely unexpected nature of the question gave Harry pause. He could not have said what he had expected. Maybe something about the tournament or about Quidditch – although what could Viktor Krum of all people possibly have to ask him about the latter – but this had definitely not been on his mental shortlist.

"Buh—between?" he unwittingly expressed his confusion just as it happened in his muddled brain. "Like a—like a thing?"

"Well, I mean, of course there is _some_ thing," Viktor quickly tried to elaborate in a belated attempt to avoid any kind of misunderstanding, "but I was wondering about the, er, the exact nature of it, yes? Because it does not look completely clear to me, I must say."

"Oh," said Harry. "You mean our… our relationship. Thing."

"Yes," Viktor confirmed with a single nod. "I do not know if you know or not, but I have spent a little time with Hermione since when I came here. Only a little, sometimes. But she talks about you a lot, I have to say. Mentions you in many different topics. And so I was thinking that perhaps, you know, it is maybe… not so simple?"

Harry took a moment to readjust his glasses, as if that would help him see things more clearly inside his head. "I see," he then said most fittingly, though his nebulous outlook regrettably remained the same. "Have you, uh, ever asked her about this?"

"Of course, yes," Viktor openly admitted. "I hope not so clumsy like right now."

A somewhat nervous smile briefly flickered across Harry's strangely taut features. "And, uh, what—what did she say, exactly?" he asked, hastily adding, "If you don't mind my asking."

"Well," Viktor answered with the hesitancy of someone sorting through their very own thoughts, "she said that you are the best friends and things like that. But it is still confusing to me, because I am not sure if I have ever heard someone talk about a friend like that. A lot."

Harry felt like there was a knot somewhere in his brain again, like a struggling dam in the violent currents of a river. Incessantly rushing against one side there was the increasing need to inquire further – and surely inappropriately so – about what exactly Hermione had said about him, but remaining relatively steadfast against the constant assault was his sense of tact and manners to be mindful of.

"And anyways," Viktor unintentionally tumbled right into Harry's inner struggle with hydrodynamics, "I wanted to speak to you personally. To hear how you feel about it yourself. About her, I mean."

"Right, right," Harry replied, nodding his head. "Why is that, again?"

By now he supposed he had a good enough idea of where this was going, but something that seemed to outweigh all reason made this most difficult to deal with and kept him from being all too straightforward about any of it – made him prefer to cling to the faint and naïve hope that his suspicion would prove unfounded.

"Please, do not misunderstand," Viktor downright implored him. "It is not my intention to be disrespectful. It is actually the opposite." He paused for a moment, raking one hand through his thick black hair as his eyes were set on the ground for a couple of thoughtfully quiet seconds. "Like I said," he continued eventually, "I have come to know Hermione a little over the last couple of weeks. Not like you, of course, but a little bit. Enough to have grown very much in my... admiration of her, yes? And so I say to you now that I wish to ask her to do me the honor of letting me be her companion to the Yule Ball. But I would never want to come in between something else that was there before me, if you understand."

Apart from a general sense of bewilderment, Harry found himself most preoccupied with the thought that Viktor Krum was slowly but surely approaching levels of courtesy he had not exactly grown up to believe possible, and adding to his already alarming degree of confusion was that weird sensation of something akin to anger he felt hotly flaring up inside of him, which he really did not understand at all.

"So?" The sound of Viktor's voice cut his aimless ruminations short once more. "Would I be messing with any complicated things if I would approach Hermione in this way?"

Harry felt a deep breath of air escape from his lungs even before he could do anything to stop it, and he hoped it would not give Viktor the wrong impression – whatever that exactly would have been. As his body continued to act on its own accord, he felt his head move from side to side, and in a way it seemed to him his following words were merely made to match his body's unbidden motions.

"No," his voice intoned, sounding hollow and distant to himself. "It's—it's just like she told you. We're friends. Very good friends." He paused as his eyes wandered off to find her sitting on the tree stump with her legs crossed underneath her and her red and gold scarf drawn up over the tip of her nose, her attention firmly held by the contents of her hands. "The best," he heard someone say as if from far away, and he was not even sure if the voice had only been inside his head.

"She is very special," Viktor remarked when his eyes followed Harry's, who made some sort of agreeing noise as nothing more could escape his tightening throat in that moment. "When you talk about someone smart, someone kind and someone pretty, you should usually be speaking of multiple different persons, yes? And yet… there she is."

"Yeah," said Harry, his voice barely more than a rough, almost broken whisper. "There she is."

An odd sensation surged through his body, like a shiver from end to end that seemed to have little to do with the cold of winter, and he felt like something inside of his chest contracted and tightened until it almost hurt a little, and as if that disconcerting something weighed down heavily on his heart.

"I can ask her then?" Viktor's voice sharply resounded in Harry's ears like an unwanted reconnection to the outside world. "It would be okay?"

"Yes," Harry affirmed in a daze that he hoped would escape Viktor's perceptive faculties. "Yes, of course." And then, just as Hermione raised her head and her eyes met his from across the distance for the briefest of moments even as he himself turned his head away from her, whatever had been so close to relenting inside of him convulsed once more in defiance of any opposing force, and he heard himself speak up in a stranger's voice.

"There's another problem, though, which I just remembered," he said, and the lack of effort it ultimately seemed to take him would later come back to haunt him. "I'm afraid she already has a date."

The instant disappointment that spread across Viktor's slightly gaunt features like a shadow that banished the glint in his deep-set eyes with immediate effect did not fail to feel like a stab to Harry's heart.

"Oh?" For a moment Viktor Krum struggled for words, and it had nothing to do with the foreign nature of the language he tried to find them in. "I—I should not be surprised, of course. For more than one reason. I just hoped… I hoped I would be quick enough to at least have a chance. I wanted to ask her at the first opportunity yesterday, but Karkaroff would not accept any distractions from my strict training regime and by the time I was done it was too late. I mean, I have wanted to ask her for weeks now, right after the first task especially, but I was very uncertain. Not about her, but—"

He ended on something Harry could only suspect to be swearing in Bulgarian, and a silence followed in the wake of his words that Harry spent listening to his merciless inner chorus of accusations, and unable to speak out loud he averted his eyes from the misery he himself had caused.

"Now I would really prefer to not go at all, I must say," Viktor's voice eventually ended the silence. "I did not even consider asking anyone but her for a second. I do not think I have even been aware of anyone else, to say the truth. Not in this way."

As Viktor heaved a heavy sigh and remained quiet once more for a while after that, Harry found himself wondering what would happen if a hypothetical underage wizard without any training in Apparition at all would spontaneously attempt precisely that, secondly if the consequences of that undertaking could potentially be fatal for the hypothetical underage wizard, and thirdly – and most importantly – if such consequences could be considered not entirely undesirable under particular, albeit undisclosed, circumstances.

"Well," Viktor unintentionally leapfrogged any final conclusion Harry's vaguely morbid musings might otherwise have arrived at, "I guess I should take my leave then. I can only hope that whoever the guy Hermione agreed to—wait, it is not that Weasley boy, is it?"

"What?" Harry asked in a momentary dash of confusion that was independent of his other, all-encompassing confusion. "Oh, no, no. Not him. Yeah, that would be one show not to be missed, huh? The Hogwarts Chain Saw Massacre – who will survive and what will be left of them?"

"Right," said Viktor with a shake of his head, not too familiar with Muggle cinema history by all appearance. "In that case I can only hope that whoever it is… who is it, if I may ask?"

"It's, uh—it's that bloke," Harry once more jumped the proverbial gun, a most unwelcome habit he seemed to be developing these days, though among wizarding folk it was naturally more common to jump the wand rather than the less familiar and far more mysterious gun. "From, uh, Ravenclaw? Yeah, I don't think you know him. It's, uh… it's David… Copperfield?"

Viktor gave the kind of vague nod that was universally understood across cultures to signal entirely feigned recognition. "Very well," he nevertheless said, "Then I hope that this David Copperfield knows how lucky he is." He then threw one last and painfully wistful glance over to where Hermione was now standing next to Hagrid, and as his dark eyes briefly flickered across Harry's face he spoke in a low and saddened voice, "Thank you for your time, Harry," and with that he stepped past him and left along the narrow pathway that wound its way up the hillside back to the castle.

And for the first time that day, Harry became fully aware of just how cold it had gotten.

~•~

Nearing eight o'clock in the evening, the best that he could find to say about the whole day was that, as any other day before it, it would eventually come to an end. Notwithstanding the fact that no more noteworthy incidents had occurred after his unexpectedly momentous morning encounter with Viktor Krum to further reduce his opinion of himself and severely darken his outlook on life in general, the day had certainly not improved either as the hours progressed. Harry Potter was, quite simply, miserable. Everything seemed wrong in some way or another, skewed in a sense, and the few remaining things that perhaps were not altogether wrong did not seem quite right either. Alas, as he had no way of knowing but on principle should have expected, the worst was yet to come.

Thus, when Harry reluctantly approached the ominous door to the class room that had been designated to serve as a makeshift stage for the Triwizard champions' exclusive dancing lesson under the sure to be strict and meticulous guidance of Professor McGonagall, who had already made it unmistakably clear in a previous Transfiguration class that all those attending the Yule Ball would be representing nothing less than the very honor and respectability of Hogwarts itself, he did so with a heart so heavy he could only hope it would not end up encumbering his feet.

Transfixed to the spot right in front of the closed door, his hand rebelliously refused to reach for the handle as his inner strife continued. When after a while his mind had strayed so far from the matter at hand that he was cursing not merely that fateful October day when that bloody goblet had spit out his name, but also that far more distant day those stupid owls had started bombarding 4 Privet Drive with those stupid letters of invitation to this stupid place that was about to force him onto a stupid dance floor, luckily enough an outer voice disrupted his alarmingly rapid mental deterioration at that point.

"Having trouble deciding between the dance floor disaster waiting behind that door and the 9:30 Hogwarts Express into exile, are we?"

Minimally startled Harry turned around to find Cedric Diggory standing right behind him with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his pants, and from the looks of it he had probably quietly done so for at least a couple of seconds.

"There's a 9:30 at Hogsmeade?" Harry asked maybe a tad too hopefully.

"Nah, I'm afraid I just made that up," Cedric replied with a sympathetic smile. "Sorry."

"Damn," Harry cursed under his breath, and likely only half in jest.

A wordless quiet ensued, with Harry once more staring at the metallic and finely ornamented handle of the door, numbed by a sense of foreboding that might just have rivaled that of Professor Trelawney in its aggrandizement, while Cedric idly swayed back and forth on the balls and heels of his feet. Suddenly becoming aware of the rather awkward nature of the situation, Harry threw a sideways glance at the _actual_ champion of Hogwarts, as he preferred to call him in his mind, and nervously tried to muster a smile. Success or failure, it apparently prompted Cedric to speak up.

"So, while we are standing here pondering all our life choices," he said, "there's something I wanted to talk to you about. I had this idea, basically. Just a thought."

Harry, having quickly developed a special sort of sense for this conspicuously inconspicuous line of conversation over the last couple of days – alongside an allergy to the very same – immediately felt his whole body tense up in apprehension. Cedric, however, oblivious to his medically alarming reaction, continued unperturbed.

"You see, I had a chat with Hermione earlier and—"

"Bloody hell, you've got to be kidding me!" Harry burst out in a verbal eruption of equal despair and disbelief, both of which were vividly visualized as he flung his arms into the air above his head. "You too? Is this some kind of conspiracy? It's a prank you're all collectively pulling on me, isn't it? Surely Fred and George must be behind it! Am I on TV right now? At least point me to the bloody cameras so I can keep some of my dignity and wave, for Merlin's sake!"

As Cedric recoiled ever so slightly and an uncertain yet vaguely amused smile commingled with his otherwise entirely perplexed expression, Harry – still breathing heavily as the aura of paranoia emanating from him dissipated not too quickly – eventually found the belated presence of mind to question the adequacy of his inadvertent and painfully impetuous outburst. The most annoying property of hindsight, after all, is that it always and reliably so makes foresight look good.

"So… talking to Hermione generally is a bad idea, because…" Cedric jocularly attempted to infer.

"Because David Copperfield already did," a third voice joined the uncommonly volatile exchange, and both Harry and Cedric turned their heads to see Viktor Krum coming to a halt next to Harry.

"I'm sorry," Cedric confusedly said in lieu of a proper greeting, "who did what?"

"David Copperfield," Viktor replied with a fleeting glance at Harry, who, even though he already was the smallest of the three, somehow felt like he was shrinking even further. "The boy Hermione has agreed to accompany to the ball."

"Huh?" Cedric asked in genuine puzzlement. "I don't know any David Copperfield." Yet even as he spoke he found himself distracted by some hectic kind of motion in the corner of his eye and momentarily focused on it without turning his head, and increasingly discombobulated by the whole course of events he did not even really wonder how Harry had ended up standing just a little step behind Viktor all of a sudden, where he was now wildly and beseechingly nodding his head at him, which prompted Cedric to hastily add without much deliberation, "Except for the one in Gryffindor, of course."

The nodding instantly turned into an even more emphatic shaking of the head, and with one or two more sideways glances Cedric sputtered on, "I mean Huffle—Ravenpuff! Claw! Ravenclaw, of course. David Copperfield, yeah. Great Quidditch player. You should see him play sometime."

More headshaking with lips pursed and eyes pressed tightly shut. Never a good sign.

"Or not," Cedric was quick to revise his improvised embellishment. "He's really not that good at all. Not worth your time, really. That's why we never invite him to our scrimmages, actually. He's just… you know?" He made a dismissive gesture with his hand to salvage whatever he may.

The only motion in Viktor's impressively impassive expression came in the shape of a slight twitch at the outer end of one of his thick, dark eyebrows as he ever so slightly turned his head to look at Harry, who appeared to be very busy with pulling one strand of his black hair down to the bridge of his nose for some reason.

"Well," the sallow-skinned Durmstrang champion then said as he turned his attention back to Cedric, "all I hope is that he is a good person who will treat Hermione with the respect she deserves."

"Oh, I doubt he'll fare very well if he doesn't," Cedric amicably replied. "But I'm sure he will. He's a great fella." Throwing another inconspicuous glance into Harry's general direction, Cedric found him grimacing and shrugging his shoulders. "I mean, not _that_ great, obviously. Like, nothing out of the ordinary."

"He's okay, though," Harry jumped in at that point to prevent any further contradictions.

"Exactly," Cedric readily agreed. "Like that one time, when he did that thing?"

"Classic David," Harry complemented, and in his mind he could almost see their imaginary friend doing that very thing, whatever it was.

Just in that moment, giving three young men a nice little start, the door behind them flew wide open and Professor McGonagall sternly fixated the three of them in quick succession, her nostrils flaring as dangerously as her eyes were twinkling.

"Were the gentlemen planning on joining us at all this evening?" she asked them icily, and it was perfectly clear to all three of the addressed that her question was merely an order in disguise. "We are waiting."

As the professor brusquely turned on her heels and retreated back into the class room, Viktor was the first to follow without another word, unwittingly allowing Harry and Cedric a much needed moment to collect themselves. When each of them had in- and exhaled a deep breath or two, they finally stepped inside as well, and just as they did so Cedric leaned into Harry and asked him on a furtive whisper, "Exactly what kind of bollocks did I just talk to Viktor Krum?"

And Harry answered on the quiet, "I'll explain it all in the letter I'll send you from Micronesia."

~•~

More than two, if not quite three punishing hours later, having survived – if barely so – that royal embarrassment others might euphemistically refer to as a dancing lesson, Harry was just arriving at the portrait of the Fat Lady with a mind no less worn out than his sore and aching feet. What the past couple of days and that one in particular had done to the former, Professor McGonagall's rigorous regimen of endless repetition in pursuit of perfection and a pair of new and hardly comfortable dancing shoes had done to the latter.

When the Fat Lady, half asleep when she noticed him standing in front of her, asked him for the password, he tiredly mumbled, "Amantes amentes," grouchily realized he had already forgotten what that even meant and, by the time he reached the other side of the portrait hole and stepped into the common room, had already forgotten what he had been so grouchy for a whole three seconds earlier.

With a quick visual sweep of the warmly lit and pleasantly quiet room he saw that only a handful of the older students were still scattered about, like a seventh year couple huddled up to one another on one of the wide window sills, manifestly reluctant to leave for annoyingly separate dorm rooms. Harry's eyes, however, were searching for something else and quite specific, and knowing exactly where to look for it, it was quickly found.

In the usual spot on that one cushy armchair near the fireplace she sat, her legs crossed underneath her and a red wooly blanket wrapped around her slender frame. In her lap there rested a large and voluminous book that was the sole recipient of her attention. At that most familiar sight, instead of going straight for bed as virtually every muscle in his body cried out for him to do, Harry's tired legs carried him to the empty armchair that stood across from hers at the other side of the generously cushioned chesterfield. Once there, he simply slumped right down into it with the full weight of his utterly exhausted body and let his eyes fall shut in defeat.

"I'm done," he pithily encapsulated his life.

"Scuttled and shuffled enough for one day?" he heard Hermione's voice ask, and he could easily make out the ghost of a smile in its sound alone. He briefly peeked at her with one eye only.

"One day?" he incredulously asked her in return. "I've shuffled so much I almost shuffled off this mortal coil." Hearing her giggle unavoidably brought a smile to his own lips, which made him realize that weirdly enough even his facial muscles felt completely strained. How had he managed to include those in the whole dancing shenanigans?

"I'm glad Professor McGonagall let you off in the nick of time, then," Hermione said, and when Harry heard her close her rather weighty book with an audible thump he opened both his eyes and looked over to her.

"I didn't mean to interrupt," he told her earnestly. "You don't have to stop reading just because I've chosen this armchair as my final resting place."

She tilted her head to the side and screwed up her face at him. "Enough with the morbid jokes already," she told him with a touch of seriousness lightened by her simultaneous smile, and with his eyes closed once more he weakly raised his hands from the padded armrests as a tacit apology.

"Am I right to assume that I made the altogether nicer plans for the night?" she asked after a couple of seconds in which only the low flames in the fireplace whispered in crackling voices.

"I think everybody did," Harry drily answered. "Although hardly any of this can be called my personal preference."

"Fair enough," Hermione amusedly allowed. "Was it really that bad, though?"

"Let's just say that if that inevitable clash between Voldemort and that Bugger Who Lived should come down to an epic dance contest… we're all collectively screwed."

Hermione quickly tried to stifle her erupting chortle behind her hand when she noticed two of the other remaining students in the common room peeking over at them at the suspected utterance of the name of him who must not be named for blatantly silly and superstitious yet dramaturgically sound reasons.

"Maybe you'll just have to ask Neville to step in," she suggested in a lowered voice.

"Oh, he'll wipe the dance floor with that self-professed dark lord," Harry agreed, then pensively added, "Maybe I should ask him to take my place at the Yule Ball, too. We could brew another pint of Polyjuice Potion. So I'll probably need you to help me with coercing Neville into helping me."

With his self-deprecation slowly but surely approaching unprecedented levels, it was time for some appropriate eye-rolling on Hermione's part, skillfully accompanied by some moderate headshaking. "You'll be fine," she told him, yet his subsequent expression hardly showed conviction. "Did the others even fare any better?"

"Sure, let's rub it in and twist the knife a little while we're at it, shall we?" Harry jokingly replied. "If it hadn't been for Viktor, I would've felt like an infant among gods. While Fleur and Cedric were busy swirling about with Roger and Cho as if gravity itself had ceased to affect them, the two of us were stuck with those magically animated mannequins as dance partners, and I'm severely unsettled by the fact that I can't even decide whether that was worse than having to dance with another human being or better."

"Oh," was Hermione's noticeably subdued response. "Is that why you've been so distant all day?"

"What?" Harry perplexedly asked in return. "My mannequin was actually a more competent dancer than me and surprisingly pleasant company, I'll have you know. I'm even considering to ask her to be my date for the big night. She seemed a bit wooden, but I think I'll give her the benefit of the doubt."

Hermione made a face at him, oblivious to the authenticity of his ignorance pertaining to her question.

"I was talking about Cho and Cedric," she enlightened him nonetheless, albeit with a modicum of impatience, and luckily enough she did not look at him in the moment his eyes widened to properly take in all that unexpected enlightenment.

"Oh, yeah, right," he hastily agreed. "That's, uh—that's devastating, obviously. I'm already in denial, it seems. Hardly thought about it at all."

Hermione seemed hesitant for a moment. "So, did you find out the hard way when you asked her, or… ?"

"Nah, didn't get around to that," Harry dodged with stilted nonchalance. "It seems to me they really have an actual thing, though. Cho and Cedric, I mean. So it's really fine, I suppose. For them at least. Devastating for me, of course, but… fine. Basically. What about you, anyway?"

"What about me?" Hermione asked a little guardedly, absently twiddling with a loose thread of her blanket.

"Well," he carefully tried, "are you still so adamant about… this whole thing?"

"Did I miss anything that should somehow have changed my stance?"

"I know, I know," Harry quickly backpedaled. "What about my stance, though? The one I told you about? Just as a different sort of view, I mean. Is there really no one you could see yourself doing this with?"

Her whole body language spoke elaborately of defensiveness. "What I don't see is the relevance in that," she retorted a bit tetchily, "since nobody's asking me anyway."

Despite that strange and discomforting tightness he once more felt building beneath his ribcage, Harry somehow managed to say, "I know for a fact that that's not true." He gulped to fight the contraction in his throat, then added, "Besides, it's still two weeks until Christmas. Someone will ask you, and more than one will be considering it."

"No matter," Hermione dismissed what she suspected to be unnecessary words of comfort, well-intentioned as she was sure they were, and rising from the armchair to neatly fold up her blanket she added with her back turned towards Harry, "I won't be going to that ball either way."

Facing him once again a few seconds later, the look he was giving her made her expound in a meek, almost apologetic voice, "It's just not my world, Harry. Can you even picture me in a dress? Please! I'd be a fish out of water. And don't you pity me! I'm perfectly fine with it and I have no interest in suffocating whatsoever, to stick with the metaphor. I prefer to stay in my element, thank you very much. It's my home, after all. It's where I can be myself."

Harry gave a slow nod in response, averting his eyes as he evidently preferred to look at his hands which he had folded atop his stomach. His mute and oddly unreadable reaction puzzled Hermione and made her feel slightly uneasy, as if she were being judged for not conforming to someone else's expectations, which was just about the last kind of feeling she would ever have associated with Harry's presence.

"Well," she spoke unsurely, hugging both book and blanket tightly to her chest, "I'll be going to bed now. I hope you're truly not too upset about Cho, and—and there are plenty of fish in the sea, right? Isn't that what people usually tell each other in this kind of situation? And I should know, too, since I live there and all that. So… yeah."

When she faintly cleared her throat and Harry looked up at her, the smile came to his lips far more easily than he had feared it would. Weak as it was and certainly not unburdened, on some level at least it was genuine.

"Good night," he wished her softly, and she returned it likewise. After a moment's hesitance, she turned and made straight for the staircase to the girls' dormitories, where she vanished from sight after a couple of swiftly ascended steps and without once looking back.

As soon as she was gone, Harry sank even deeper into the upholstery, all but wishing the armchair would simply swallow him whole and make everyone forget about him in a fortnight. Three was, surprisingly enough, the right number of Triwizard champions, anyway. With a sudden sense of clarity – and most annoyingly so – he realized that for the whole duration he had spent in McGonagall's school of terpsichorean torture he had at the very least been unable to wallow in all the woe and misery that now came back to him to once again haunt him like a shadow. Though unlike his shadow, as he knew too well, his misery would not vanish along with the light.

And then, newly contributing to his increasing and at this rate soon to be unbearable dilemma was – in no small measure – also the immutable fact that he was now officially picturing Hermione in a dress.

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Hitchcock:_ Harry's shower thought is a reference to the most iconic scene from the 1960 masterpiece _Psycho,_ which itself was based on the Robert Bloch novel of the same name, published the year before. There's a remake, too, but we don't talk about that here.

 _The Hogwarts Chain Saw Massacre:_ This one's an allusion to the seminal 1974 horror movie of almost the same name, directed by Tobe Hooper. "Who will survive and what will be left of them" was its most catchy slogan, prominently featured on many of the original movie posters. Now, why would our dear Harry, at the innocent age of 14, be familiar with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Because living with the Dursleys, Leatherface is a great guy through whom to live vicariously for a pleasantly therapeutic evening. And remember, he could've been great in Slytherin...

 _Hamlet:_ Two references to the tragedy of the troubled prince are made in this chapter, and it goes something like, "Someone rotten is shuffling off their mortal coil in the state of Denmark," or something along those lines.


	3. Aggravation

**• Chapter III •**

 **Aggravation**

Whenever someone is found gazing in abstraction at a plateful of mashed potatoes for longer than it would take others to eat them, it is hardly ever considered to be a sign of good mental health by outside observers for reasons not in the least irrational, for that unfortunate line of the genus Homo that did once make an unbreakable habit of staring at their food rather than consuming it has naturally long since been extinct.

To Harry, however, on that dismal mid-December day, the unprepossessing splotch of mash in front of him, with two browned sausages on top to aptly round it off, seemed like a physical manifestation of the very essence of life itself: hopelessly messy, latently repulsive and generally only palatable when actually hungry. And hungry he was not.

Three more days had passed since that encounter with Viktor Krum, when he had transformed from a perhaps excusably accidental or at worst misguided liar to an undeniably willful one. Three more days of repeating their conversation over and over again in his increasingly weary mind, of pretending to be the same Harry he had always been in front of his unsuspecting friends, of keeping the lies alive out of fear and cowardice and of loathing himself all the more with every passing second. Three more days for his misery to be distilled further and further, and it seemed to be about ninety-nine percent done.

It could be surprisingly easy, he found, to dig one's own grave. The tricky part was to stop digging early enough for one last moment of self-examination, ideally with the option to change one's mind still viable, or else there would no longer be any way to go but down. As far Harry was concerned, he felt like he should have arrived at the Terracotta army by now, which would have been a pretty nice getaway too had it not been destined to become his burial chamber. Which, at the very least, was fitting.

Alas, there he was on Friday noon, digging merely metaphorically as he was sitting in the Great Hall between his two best friends as usual, surrounded by a couple hundred of students of the rambunctiously jolly and exuberantly chatty, weekend-enthused, Christmas-anticipating and therefore altogether despicable kind. They were, the lot of them, absolutely unaware of his abject misery, and they did not even have the decency to pretend otherwise.

When amidst all his woe and worry he suddenly felt the firm touch of a hand on his left shoulder he was so startled he almost slipped right off the bench.

"Sausage, sausage on the plate," Fred's unmistakable voice intoned dramatically, and already Harry felt another hand on his right shoulder as George forthwith followed, "Who shall be my Yule Ball date?"

Harry heaved a slightly exasperated sigh, but at least tore his eyes away from his plate for once, if only to look heavenward in desperate search for some much needed cosmic intervention that would never come.

"Leave him alone," Ron gallantly sprang to his friend's defense, then immediately ruined the heroic impression with a roguish grin. "It's so tragically hard to make up your mind when you got as many options as him."

"The poor boy," George plaintively concurred with a shake of his bowed head.

"Sure sounds like sheer torment," added Fred, encouragingly patting Harry's back.

"What about our dear little brother, though?" George mischievously switched his attention. "If it's the amount of options that's giving Harry trouble, surely you should be faring a little better than him. Care to share the results?"

"Put a sock in it, will you?" Ron promptly snapped at him, probably all the more irascible since he had already finished his bangers and mash and was in want of dessert. "I'm still working on it. Besides, last time I checked you didn't have any dates yet, either. You're all mouth and trousers."

"That so?" Fred casually challenged him. "Then how come I'm gonna rock the dance floor with Angelina, huh?"

Ron's features fell into an expression of dismay. "You—you're set? You asked her? She said yes? Really?"

"Oh, bollocks!" Fred answered with his forefinger raised into the air. "I knew I skipped a step somewhere. Just a second." He looked over to where Angelina Johnson sat next to Alicia Spinnet at the opposite side of the table. "Oi, Angelina!" She swirled around. "Wanna go to the ball with me? You know I got the moves."

She arched a quizzical eyebrow at him. "Which one are you again?"

"Fred," he replied. "The funny one, remember?"

"Everybody knows I got the looks, though," George sullenly mumbled.

Angelina appraised him for a second longer, then gave a shrug, said, "Why not?" and resumed her chat with Alicia with a newfound smile lighting up her features, while Fred turned back to face his positively flabbergasted brother.

"There you go," he said. "If you'll excuse us now."

"We've got things to be and places to do," George added.

"Cheerio!" they said in unison and jauntily went their way.

"I don't believe it," Ron breathed as if in a daze, vacantly gazing into space with his mouth stupidly agape and the whole glory of his gormless expression frozen on his face for well-nigh five seconds of stillness. Then his eyes refocused on Harry's plate, and leaning onto the table on a crooked elbow he let his head slump into his outstretched hand, looked up at his friend and asked, "So you gonna eat that or what?"

"You should," Hermione joined the exchange she had been all too glad to be left out of up until that point, and a disappointed grunt was heard from Harry's other flank, which Hermione elected to ignore. "At least a little," she added, "if you can. Your breakfast already was more than a little meager." At that she closed the book she had been reading – or pretending to be reading over the last couple of minutes, so as not to draw any unwanted attention – and put it down on the table in front of her. Regarding Harry intently for a moment she worriedly asked, "Are you not feeling well?"

With a conspicuous delay between her question and his reaction, he eventually shrugged his shoulders. "Just not very hungry, that's all."

Before Hermione could give utterance to the doubt that was so plainly written on her features, a languidly yawning Ron unknowingly forestalled her.

"Say, isn't there lots of dancing in those kinds of books?"

Hermione's eyes first switched from Harry to Ron, then darted down to the book in question. She reached for it and held onto it in a rather protective fashion with its front turned towards her chest. "Oh, so you are familiar with the novel of manners, then?"

"Well, I _have_ heard of manners before," an unfazed Ron replied, "and I'm pretty sure there's lots of dancing in those books."

"Regardless of the validity of your assertion, dancing is most assuredly not what any of these books are actually about," Hermione informed him, defensively snobbish.

"Still seems funny to me that you would read books with so much dancing in them," Ron, as per habit, blindly rushed ahead where angels fear to tread, "considering how you supposedly hate it all so much."

Hermione took a very, very deep breath. "If you are implying what I assume you are implying, would you, by that same logic, also venture to infer that I harbor a secret desire to butcher people and serve their lovingly prepared remains for dinner if I were reading _The Silence of the Lambs?_ "

Ron narrowed his eyes to slits. "Maybe," he said most suspiciously, and even Hermione had to laugh at that and the two were therewith reconciled at least for the moment. "What's that silence of those lambs all about, though," Ron curiously went forth to ask, "and what do silent lambs have to do with butchering and eating people?"

With a smile still persisting on her face, Hermione began packing her belongings back into her small shoulder bag, shaking her head as Ron went on, "Are they the ones doing all the butchering? Are they creepy, silent killer-lambs? Is that even an actual book? You're just having me on, aren't you? _Silence of the Lambs?_ Come on! Probably just a children's book, innit?"

"I wouldn't particularly recommend it as a bedtime story," Hermione answered with some amusement, ready to leave by all appearance. "Oh, by the way, Harry, I had a rather peculiar conversation with Cormac McLaggen earlier today."

No matter how far Harry had strayed in his mind from his physical surroundings and any conscious awareness of space and time at that point, he was instantly either pulled or thrown right back into the hard material world with so brutal a force that he felt he should have been squished into a shapeless pulp not unlike the one on his untouched plate, abstract as the whole sensation ultimately was.

"I—I, I-I-I," he set out to recite the egomaniac's alphabet, although to his credit it should be mentioned that he did in fact desperately search for a second letter to utter throughout his stammering performance.

"Gosh, Harry! Relax," Hermione, at first caught off guard by his helpless reaction, quickly tried to soothe him. "It's fine, really. I know how protective you can get, and while it may not have been entirely necessary in this instance, I nevertheless appreciate your trying to spare me this particular nuisance. I really do."

The vocal response Harry intended to give ended up being a rather pitiful, voiceless croaking sound that barely managed to get out of his throat, which he attempted to clear thereafter. Then he reached for his cup of tea that had also remained untouched thus far, took a sip that turned into a gulp that turned into an empty cup. Ron and Hermione watched him with bewildered expressions on their faces, then exchanged a look of mutual perplexity when he set the cup back down on its clattering porcelain saucer.

"Mh," he then made, and no one knew exactly what that meant, including him.

Unsurprisingly, there was an awkward beat of silence between the three of them.

"In other news," Ron then spoke up, "I have not a clue what any of this is about. Again."

"Well, apparently Harry told Cormac McLaggen that I already had a date for the Yule Ball when he asked him about me," Hermione explained, monitoring Harry's odd condition with multiple sidelong glances.

Ron was baffled. "McLaggen wanted to ask you out?" he asked her. " _McLaggen?_ "

Hermione's familiarity with Ron's outspoken abhorrence for the walking embodiment of everything that could go wrong with the ideals of House Gryffindor ensured that for once she could not take his comment to be in any way aimed at her.

"Couldn't believe it myself," she therefore admitted with a casual shrug. "It was the first thing I was confused by right after being confused by hearing that I purportedly had a date I didn't even know of myself. I almost regret clarifying things, since I might otherwise simply have confirmed it to avoid having to listen to him pitying _me_ for missing out on the opportunity to accompany _him_ to that sodding ball, because by now he _obviously_ already had somebody else."

"Seriously?" Ron asked, his incredulity only surpassed by his unmitigated disgust.

"Uh-huh," Hermione confirmed with a nod.

"That yukky, arrogant son of a witch!"

"So, uh," Harry interposed, most likely unaware of anything that had been said since last he had been aware of anything, "you wouldn't have said yes to Cormac, then? Even if I hadn't... interfered?"

Hermione furrowed her brow at that. "Why in the Founders' names would I?"

"Yeah, come on, mate," Ron wholeheartedly agreed. "If there's anyone who could even hope to sway our hermit in disguise here, it would have to be just about the exact opposite of that daft wanker. Even I know that much."

"Oh, and who would that be?" Hermione doubtfully asked, not even expecting an answer.

"Well," Ron naturally ignored the rhetorical nature of her question, "prolly someone more like Harry, I reckon. Ideally someone who already knows how crazy you are and—what?"

Noticing both his friends staring at him with well-nigh identically horror-stricken expressions, his blue eyes darted back and forth between their green and brown and equally widened counterparts in confusion. "What?" he repeated. "I said _like_ Harry, not… you know… _Harry_. Blimey, you guys are weird sometimes."

Continuing to shake his head, Ron rose from the bench, which at the very least also served to yank Harry and Hermione out of their strikingly symmetrical stupor.

"Yes, we'd better hurry up," Hermione spluttered, hastily swirling around and deftly jumping to her feet, "or we'll be late for class."

"As if Binns could even tell the difference," Ron wryly remarked.

"I'd like to think he would miss the only student who actively participates in his class," Hermione replied with a proudly jutted chin as she made for the great two-winged entrance door.

"I don't think he _wants_ anyone to participate," Ron pointed out, following right behind her.

As for Harry, he still remained motionlessly in his seat, his shoulders slumped and his eyes blankly gazing right through the ebony table. When a couple of seconds had passed since he had last heard the voices of his two friends and he suddenly realized how quiet it had overall gotten in the emptied hall, he blinked emphatically and inhaled as much air as his lungs allowed, then loudly blew it all out again through puffed-up cheeks for nearly ten whole seconds. Afterwards, he stood up like a limp puppet on worn-out strings and with his eyes directed at the ground walked a few steps, then raised his head, shook it in irritation and sighed once more.

"Excuse me," he despondently said to no one in particular, "I'm looking for the exitus."

He turned around and shambled into the opposite direction instead – the one that actually led to the two-winged door of the Great Hall and, by extension, the Terracotta army.

~•~

Three hours later, with all the day's classes now behind him and the pitiful rest of his miserable existence stretched out before him, he knew with painful certainty that he could simply not take it anymore. Every time Hermione smiled at him as naturally and innocently as ever, something in his chest squirmed and writhed. Every time their arms inadvertently touched during class, it was like a device of torture to him – like an electrical surge right into his guilt-ridden conscience. Every time she asked him something he felt unworthy of even talking to her, like it should be forbidden to the villainous likes of him. And then there was Ron, of course, who was just annoyingly _Ron_ all day long.

Over the course of the morning he had already developed a nasty headache, and by now it felt like something was constantly pressing against the inside of his skull with reckless abandon. What even a single professor had been droning on about during their afternoon classes he could not have said. Every sound seemed muffled in a way, barely reaching his ears at all. The very light of day appeared dulled to him, bleaker somehow, and yet violently oppressive at the same time. He felt like there was something between him and the outside world, like a thick, invisible veil that grew heavier and heavier with every passing minute, pushing in on him, confining and suffocating. And opposing it, deep from within, some other sort of pressure pushed constantly outward.

After Professor McGonagall had finally released them into the weekend and he and Ron parted ways with Hermione, who apparently was headed elsewhere, making their way back towards Gryffindor tower Harry realized, as he had kept digging and digging and China still was nowhere in sight, there were only two options left to him at that point: he would either have to admit himself to St. Mungo's mental ward, or… the other thing. And even though he still felt undecided on which one of these options was actually preferable to the other, at some point, when they had just stepped onto one of the moving staircases in the castle's central tower and after having listened to Ron buzzing away like a busy hive of bees for minutes on end – as that was what to him talking people sounded like on that day – his brain suddenly sent some input to his own underutilized organs of speech.

"I have a problem, Ron," he therewith blurted out, and the first response he got, besides the abrupt ceasing of the buzzing sound, was a fairly expressive arched eyebrow.

"You mean like Dylan Englewood from second year?" Ron asked him. "Rumor has it he's in the hospital wing right now after supposedly trying a _Phallus Maximus_ on himself."

"No, I'm—what?" Harry momentarily lost his train of thought. " _Phallus Maximus?_ Second year?"

"A little overeager, I suppose," Ron answered with a shrug. "But with all the love that's in the air around here it was only a matter of time until it got into somebody's pants."

Harry just stared at him for a moment. "Is that even an actual spell?"

"Why?" Ron asked with a roguish smirk. "Arousing your interest, innit?"

Harry frowned, then shook his head as he discarded the impulse to even deign an answer. "No, I _really_ have a problem," he instead picked up where he had left off prior to confusing genitalia-related gossip, this time with a more emphatic enunciation. Then he sighed, his shoulders sagging, and without looking up at Ron he bluntly declared, "I'm an asshole, Ron."

"Wicked," he was puzzled to hear his friend casually reply. "I'm a nitwit. We should open a business or something."

"I'm serious," Harry sternly insisted, looking straight at him now. "I'm a spineless and egotistical git, okay? I—I'm a deceitful, disingenuous, scheming crook. I'm irredeemably stupid and morally bankrupt and I have no integrity whatsoever."

Ron looked mildly impressed. "Have you considered a career in politics?"

"Damn it, Ron!" Harry irritably snapped at him. "I'm seriously being dead serious here!"

"Okay," Ron slowly answered with an appeasing gesture of his hands. "And I'm still patiently waiting for you to say anything that could even remotely be taken seriously. Otherwise I'll honestly have to go with our poor fella Dylan and his _Phallus Maybe-Not-So-Maximus_ as the headline of the day. No offense."

"Oh, I'll be making headlines soon enough," Harry bitterly grumbled, "when I'm opening the Yule Ball dancing with a wooden mannequin."

Ron looked understandably befuddled. "Yeah, you're gonna have to explain that one."

Harry sighed once more, shaking his head in defeat. "I've messed up."

Ron didn't look any less befuddled following that. "With the mannequin?"

"With everybody!" Harry almost shouted, making Ron wince and recoil. "I didn't just lie to Cormac McLaggen, Ron. I lied to Viktor Krum, too. I've been lying to all of you. Probably even to myself, in one way or another. To Hermione, maybe most of all. Even to you. Directly, by omission or just with all the pretense. In any way possible, I reckon. And I'm sickened by it and I don't know how to fix it and I think I might be going crazy and I—"

Ron grabbed Harry's shoulders as he calmly interrupted his friend's potentially endless cascade of confusing confessions. "Easy now," he repeatedly said, and once he deemed Harry to be far enough from the imminent threat of hyperventilation, he carried on, "Remember that long gone time when you said things that actually made sense?" He waited for Harry to quizzically look up at him. "Let's get back to that."

"Yeah, I could really use a Time-Turner right about now," Harry replied, then exhaled a shaky breath as Ron cautiously let go of his shoulders. "Remember what Hermione told you about Cormac McLaggen? About what I told him? I told Viktor the exact same thing. The same lie."

Ron creased his forehead as much as his skin allowed. "What was that again, exactly?"

Harry, his patience wearing thin, grunted in exasperation. "That Hermione is spoken for as far as the Yule Ball is concerned?"

That did not have any flattening effect on Ron's deeply furrowed brow whatsoever.

"What would you do that for?" he asked in utter incomprehension. "Are you just randomly walking up to people telling them about Hermione's dating status these days?"

"No? They keep walking up to me and to inquire about it for some reason, okay?"

"Viktor Krum, too?"

"Yes."

"Viktor Krum approached you to talk about Hermione?"

"Yes?"

"Viktor Krum wanted to ask Hermione to the Yule Ball?"

"Yes!"

"Viktor Krum?"

"Bloody hell, _yes_ , Ron!" Harry groaned, desperately flinging his arms into the air. "Please don't tell me you're actually jealous of _her!"_

"At least she's getting his attention," a bashful Ron mumbled away as he softly kicked one of the steps with the tip of his shoe. Whether incited by his kick or merely by coincidence, the staircase they stood upon gave a cracking jolt in that very moment and began moving into one of its innumerable alternative positions, making Ron and Harry hold on to the banister as the whole interior of the tower was suddenly in a kind of motion that would have confused even Maurits Cornelis Escher.

"I'll never understand how anyone could ever think these moving staircases were a sensible idea," a thoroughly displeased Harry complained, raising his voice against the creaking and the shuffling of a dozen floating stairways.

"Wasn't it Rowena Ravenclaw who came up with it?" Ron wondered aloud.

"Really?" asked Harry. "I thought she was supposed to have been the smart one. This is like a bad theme park ride!"

With another rattling jolt the staircase came to rest in its new position, now connecting two entirely different points of entrance and exit.

"Anyway," said Ron almost as if they never had been interrupted by self-propelled interior furnishings. "So you thought Hermione already had a date?"

"What?" Harry asked perplexedly. "Are you even listening to what I'm trying to tell you? I _lied_. Deliberately. Knowingly. It would be kind of hard to forget that Hermione does in fact not have a date for the Yule Ball, what with her reminding me on every occasion how opposed she is to the very idea of it."

"So you were trying to do her a favor, then?"

"Not exactly," Harry replied with some hesitance. "With Cormac, maybe. Partly. But with Viktor…"

"Yeah, what's your problem with Viktor Krum?"

"What?"

"You think he's unworthy or something?" Ron interrogated him reproachfully. "Don't you like him? Don't you think Hermione, heck, anyone would be very lucky to be asked by him?"

"I—I said nothing of the sort," Harry replied defensively. "Seriously, Ron. You are completely missing the point here."

"Am I?" Ron challenged him heatedly. "Because from where I'm standing it looks an awful lot like you're just being mean to Viktor Krum for no apparent reason. And there is no reason to be mean to Viktor Krum. He doesn't deserve this. It's tough being a celebrity, you know?"

"Ron, you're—"

Again the staircase jerked beneath them, and everything was set in motion once again as both Harry and Ron staggered and groaned in frustration. While Ron busied himself with some justifiable coarse language, Harry merely dropped his head onto his arms that he held crossed on top of the handrail while the staircase was busy moving around again, this time ending up just where it had been prior to its first jumpy journey.

When it snapped into its temporarily fixed position with a loud _Crack!_ once more, Harry slowly straightened himself up with a thoughtful expression on his features.

"You're right," he then breathed, his whisper fraught with meaning.

"What's that?" Ron asked as he turned to face him, still a little caught up in his damnation of Hogwarts' wacky founding fathers and mothers.

"You're right," Harry repeated without looking at him, his gaze even more distant than his voice.

"Yes. Yes, I am," Ron readily agreed. "About what?"

"Everything," came Harry's answer, much to Ron's subsequent puzzlement. "All of it. Gosh, why didn't I realize this sooner? I knew it all along, didn't I? I knew it as soon as I did it. And yet I kept pushing it away, hoping to find some other solution that wouldn't feel like a walk to the gallows. But there isn't. I have to face it. I have to answer for what I've done. It's that simple."

Ron looked mostly clueless as he watched Harry with increasing apprehension, yet the wrinkles on his forehead also spoke quite clearly of his worry for his friend's sanity.

"It's clear as day, isn't it?" Harry went on, and Ron felt at best half-addressed. "Thinking the right thing is one thing, yet doing it is quite another." He then looked up at Ron, who could not help but notice that his best friend's features somehow looked lighter than they had just a minute ago. "Thank you. I think I just needed this one last shove, you know? I don't just see it now, I can finally reach it. That's exactly it!"

"Uh—"

"Thanks, Ron," said Harry, nodding his head quite enthusiastically. "I need to go now. I need to _do!_ "

And already he bounced up the stairs, taking two steps at once and reaching the top before a torpid Ron could even do so much as blink.

"You're, uh, welcome?" the young Weasley then aimlessly mumbled. "Uh."

He remained glued to the spot for a moment longer, his addled brain trying hard to make sense of anything that had just transpired as his newly energized friend was by now gone from sight. A shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulder, and Ron could finally move again. Four steps he managed to climb, with five more remaining to the top, when the staircase abruptly creaked and twitched again. Cursing aloud, Ron almost lost his balance, and with the stairs underneath him slowly repositioning themselves into Merlin knows what kind of place again, he plopped his forehead into the palm of his hand and surrendered to his fate.

~•~

Having hastily changed into a fresh and less uniformed outfit that was also better suited for the increasingly wintry outdoors, Harry rushed out of the dormitory and down the winding stairs into the sparsely occupied common room with the determined stride of a mind made up. No more than three last steps away from the portrait hole he came to a sudden stop with the abruptness of a mind positively startled.

"Hermione!" he ejected with a gasp, and whatever else he might have had in mind to add was stifled even in its inception when her disquieting gaze fixated on him and his heart immediately dropped so fast and deep Harry half-expected to hear what would have been a rather unsettling _Splat!_

For close to five tense seconds she stared at him without a word as Harry desperately tried to read her saturnine mien to no avail, and when she finally spoke a mere two words, though softly uttered they cut right through the air, the blatant disbelief in her voice barely masking underlying ire.

"David Copperfield?"

The sound of the name alone was like a brutal jab to the gut, striking far harder than that other ominous name in his life ever had for Harry, which frankly had never even been much of a slap in the face.

"I… I can explain!" he hastily sprang to his own defense as soon as he found his voice, and a rather mutinous part of his brain added, _'Harry Potter, last words.'_

"I would bloody well hope so," she grumbled through gritted teeth.

A swearing Hermione was always a good sign, just like rapidly receding water on the coastline after a portentous rumble of the earth. A good sign to run like hell, that is.

While Harry may or may not have contemplated actually running for his life, he was completely unaware of the seconds that passed in silence due to his rather inopportune mental stasis.

"Well?" Hermione's uncharacteristically cold voice brought him right back into the regrettable current state of affairs. "I'm waiting."

"Sorry," he was quick to apologize, and then, along with his head, his shoulders dropped so much his whole torso seemed to shrink in on itself. "I'm so, _so_ sorry," he ruefully added, frustrated in addition with the insufficiency of such empty words and numbed by an unmet need for a better, profounder way to make his sincerity known.

"About what?" asked Hermione, her voice betraying no emotion.

"Well," he mumbled with a helpless shrug, "everything."

"Less specific, please," she said sarcastically, the edge in her voice further sharpened by budding impatience. "I don't even understand what exactly you've done, Harry, let alone why. I have an annoyingly hard time making sense of why in the world you would tell people not named Cormac McLaggen that I have a date for that bloody ball even though I do not, and why you would come up with nonsense like David flipping Copperfield as my designated companion at that. What in the world has gotten into you?"

She scrutinized him intently for a moment with her hands stemmed into her hips, her chest rising and falling with her heavy breathing. Something in her expression gradually changed as she quietly looked at him, yet feeling utterly undeserving of her sympathy he was as unwilling as he was unable to see it, as he guiltily dropped his eyes once more.

"Is this a joke to you?" she asked him more softly, and for the first time there was a trace of hurt mingled into the tone of her voice, which to Harry seemed far worse than her anger had. "Am _I_ a joke to you? Just tell me if I'm simply missing the punch line here."

"Of course not!" he replied with sudden emphasis, his head swirling up to meet her eyes beseechingly. "It's nothing like that!"

"Then tell me what it is!"

"It's just—" he began, his voice raised even more to match or surpass the volume of Hermione's. Yet suddenly becoming aware of other aspects of their somewhat public surroundings, he briefly threw a glance over his shoulder to find a couple of younger Gryffindors brazenly staring back at him from another corner of the room, their curiosity so unconcealed it even took them a whole two seconds to look elsewhere in transparently faux innocence. Brave, for sure, and hardly cunning. Three students well sorted, it seemed.

With warmth spreading across his face and a groan of annoyance leaving his throat, Harry turned back to Hermione. "It was just a stupid mistake, okay?" he told her, his voice deliberately subdued.

"What kind of mistake is that?" she cut him off even as he made to continue, not mollified at all by that. "Are you seriously trying to tell me you trotted out the same ridiculous lie to two people _by_ _accident?_ "

"I didn't say anything about an accident," Harry in turn insisted. "I just… I wasn't thinking straight, and I certainly wasn't planning on making a habit of it. In fact, I was just on my way out to make it all right." She gave him a dubious look, prompting him to assure her, "Honestly! I was just on the hop to go and find Viktor when you caught me—no, not like that, damn it! I was going to apologize to him and tell him the truth. But I suppose it's too late for that now."

She gave him an icy look, her lips pursed. "Too late for you to save face, you mean?"

He made a step toward her. "Please, Hermione! I know I messed up, but I'm not that kind of person and you know it! At least... I'm trying not to be. I was not planning on going behind your back to make it look like I never did anything wrong!" He looked at her pleadingly, and for once she was the one to avert her eyes eventually. With a burdened sigh he carried on, "I just meant... well, I was under the impression that you've already met Viktor now and cleared things up, so all that remains for me to do is to apologize to the both of you and hope that he hasn't asked anyone else yet."

"Very little is being cleared up these days," she said after a moment's reluctant pause, and more than the words she spoke it was the sudden change in the cadence of her voice that puzzled him as much as it worried him, as now all hardness in its tone had given way to some faint vulnerability.

"The encounter didn't go quite the way you appear to be picturing it," she went forth to tell him as she crossed her arms, all but hugging herself. "I was the one to approach him, since I couldn't quite shake off the feeling that he had been avoiding me this whole week. We had previously agreed on going for a walk along the lakeshore on Monday, but he called it off for some reason. By letter, mind you. The days since then he hardly spoke a word to me on the rare occasion that he even seemed to be aware of my existence to begin with. And... well, the fact that he was the first nice person in my life to notice me at all in that particular and rather unfamiliar way may also have contributed its part to my confusion and subsequent irritation with the sudden change in his behavior.

"So I began to question myself, wondering what I could have done to push him away, or if maybe he had simply lost interest in me altogether, remembering perhaps that he is a young man of fame and fortune with far more desirable options than me. Especially in regard to certain public events. So I confronted him about it. About the way he was suddenly treating me, I mean. Not angrily. I didn't want to make a scene or anything. I only wished to understand, and I have so very little experience in these matters that I'm still struggling to even define them as such. It's been a rather... mystifying couple of weeks for me, to say the least. But I digress.

"He seemed to be taken aback, then genuinely ashamed. He apologized profusely for his behavior, saying, without looking me in the eye, that he had never meant to hurt me and that he was just disappointed to have learned of one David Copperfield from my friend Harry. I didn't even have the time to properly process what he had just said. The only thing he would ask of me, he told me, was to give him some time to come to terms with the fact that I evidently did not reciprocate his affection quite like that, and with a last apology he left.

"And for the first time in my life I felt like one of those women in those silly little novels I sometimes like to read. There was a kind and considerate young man, who for some inexplicable reason had laid his eyes on me. Me, of all people. Forgive me this self-piteous sentiment, but I simply couldn't quite believe it, and in fact still cannot. It might come as a surprise to you, from your dear, cerebral Hermione, who is oh so very _brilliant_ , always scoffing at all those superficial, sentimental things others seem to concern themselves with so fervently all the time, but… it made me feel good about myself. Viktor did. In a way that, quite frankly, I thought I was content enough to merely experience vicariously through the likes of Elizabeth Bennet and Margaret Hale and Jane Eyre. Just… as a girl, you know?"

She exhaled unsteadily, refusing to look his way as she had throughout her emotional monologue. Her whole body seemed to be aquiver, like a juvenile aspen tree in its first autumn.

"I know I have no right to blame you for assuming to be doing the right thing here after everything you listened to me go on about so scornfully for the past couple of weeks," she willed herself to continue, her voice as frail as it had ever been. "I can't blame you for taking me at my word. I don't. I have a harder time, however, not blaming you for taking away my own decisions, for causing so much pain and confusion with your petty lies, and for ruining all of this so willfully, so needlessly, for everybody involved. That is not at all like the Harry I know."

With a last hitch in her voice she at last broke off, and what followed in the wake of her words was a kind of silence that had never before stood between them – so pervasive, so complete that even thoughts were muted.

Harry swallowed hard, feeling something writhing in his chest. He raised his head to seek her eyes, found them glistening with tears her pride did not allow to fall.

"I don't know what to say," he eventually spoke, his voice weak and strained. "I… I had no idea. How you–how you felt. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I didn't—" He huffed angrily. "Merlin's knickers! Is there anything in the English language I can say that doesn't sound like a hackneyed phrase?"

He paused, though certainly not in anticipation of an answer to that particular query. His eyes wandered over her fragile figure, her arms still crossed protectively in front of her chest and her shoulders slightly hunched, her face averted to the side as she gazed out through the window at the far horizon, the somber light of day falling through it a shimmer in her dark reflective eyes. It was there, in their uncharted depths, that he found his determination.

"I'll make this right," he told her in dead earnest, steeling himself with every word. "I'll talk to Viktor, tell him everything, and he'll understand. I'm sure he will. I should have done so sooner – no, I shouldn't have done what I did in the first place. I know that now. I think I knew it all along. And I would change it all if I could, but what's done is done and I'm… I'm sorry, Hermione. You don't know how sorry I am. But I'll make things right."

He could see her chest tremble as she took a jittery breath, yet still she did not look at him. His eyes lingered on her as he waited for a moment, though not with any sense of purpose and entirely oblivious to whatever it might have been that he was waiting for.

"I'll make it right," he eventually said once more, and with that slipped past her, careful not to brush against her.

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Terracotta army:_ The Terracotta army were a bunch of super grim Chinese dudes that liked terracotta-colored wall paint so much they went to war for it in a fanatical attempt to spread it across the world as the one true color that everybody would have to paint all their rooms in. And this is why you should never believe anything you read on the Internet.

Actually, it's part of one of the less modest burial chambers in the history of mankind, first discovered in 1974 in Shaanxi province, China. The huge army of terracotta warriors was meant to protect Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, in the afterlife. Well, Qin Shi Huang is definitely gone, but the guys supposed to be watching over him are still here, so, uh...

 _Sausage, sausage on the plate:_ Sometimes, writing these footnotes seems kind of silly. Like, "Oh my gawd, guys! You ever heard of _Snow White?_ Guys?!"

 _Fools rush in where angels fear to tread:_ This is a well-known line from _An Essay on Criticism_ by English poet Alexander Pope, first published in 1711. He's also my favorite Pope.

 _The Silence of the Lambs:_ Novel by Thomas Harris, originally published in 1988. Not in fact about silent killer-lambs. Also a 1991 movie, starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins at the height of their craft, though regrettably neither of them plays a lamb.

 _M.C. Escher:_ A great 20th century Dutch artist who was very fond of making people go, "Wait, what?"

 _Hermione's silly little novels:_ She explicitly refers to the female protagonists of Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ (1813), Elizabeth Gaskell's _North and South_ (1855) and Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ (1847).


	4. Reflection

**• Chapter IV •**

 **Reflection**

The walk across the castle grounds and down the hillslope over to the Quidditch pitch was likely one of the stranger walks that Harry had ever taken, and certainly the most ambivalent one. Sure, he had been rather nervous heading for his first ever Quidditch match three years back, for example, but there had been nothing like the inner strife he was wrestling with during these fleeting minutes as he approached what he usually considered one of his favorite places at Hogwarts, or even in his life in general. He knew exactly where he had to go and what he had to do, which was what gave a distinct tenacity and purpose to his stride, and yet, at the same time, there remained a part of him that in defiance of that very purpose seemed to be constantly pulling at his back, away from his destination.

In the end, it was solely that fierce conviction deep within his heart that this was the right thing to do which kept him marching straight ahead, braving what he dreaded with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat and his breath swirling out into the chilling air as the frostily coated blades of grass crinkled softly beneath his boots.

If from a distance Viktor Krum's daring aerial maneuvers had already looked impressive, it was when Harry found himself standing at the edge of the pitch looking straight up at his speeding figure high above, a dark silhouette against the grey-clouded sky, that they seemed outright otherworldly – and not exclusively in the sense that it was a human being whizzing around on an airborne broomstick.

Even though it somehow gave Harry the feeling that he himself should probably never again use a broom for anything other than sweeping the floor so as not to make a fool of himself, making him think that there was, in fact, a considerable difference between actually, truly flying and merely avoiding to fall, he simultaneously felt that he could never tire of watching the Bulgarian's high-flying virtuosity. Harry might still have been something of a newcomer in the world of magical sports, but he simply could not imagine anyone ever flying with a more dazzling combination of ease and alacrity, grace and dexterity, than this young man. There was nothing artificial about it, nothing that did not seem quite right to the human observer on some primitive, instinctual level. It was a spectacle of nature, like thunder, wind and rain, immediately understood as something that simply happens outside of our control. For some reason, however, none of that did exactly contribute favorably to Harry's overall mood in that moment.

How long he stood there in silent admiration despite his latent indignation he could not have said, and since nobody else was around to remind him it was indeed rather easy to lose all track of time. After a while, when Viktor had descended to a lower altitude and his silhouette was more sharply defined, he eventually came to a halt, and hovering in mid-air seemed to be looking right down at Harry, who consequently – and hesitantly so – raised his hand and awkwardly waved it a little.

With no more than a second's delay Viktor went straight for the dive and shot down towards Harry in what might have looked either like an attempt at suicide or murder to an outside observer – and Harry as well, what with being the potential victim of the latter. Had it not been Viktor Krum, Harry might even have considered moving a muscle, but the Bulgarian wunderkind expectably broke his daring dive a couple of meters above ground by pulling his Firebolt's handle straight up to his chest and pushing his legs down into the stirrups, coming to something of a slanted, almost horizontal standing position in mid-air before taking his dive's remaining momentum into a deft, spinning bounce off the broomstick and onto his own two feet, landing almost right in front of Harry with the Firebolt coming to safely rest in his left hand.

Harry would have liked all too much to call him out for showing off, but sadly, that was just his way of landing. Considering that Viktor, as soon as his feet touched the ground, somehow and oddly enough managed to once again look like his ungainly bipedal self, it was surprisingly easy not to resent him for a landing routine that would cause mere mortals among the Quidditch-playing kind to meet their eponymous mortality.

"Harry," Viktor greeted him, plainly surprised to see him, and once Harry had returned his greeting went on to amicably ask with a skyward nod, "Care to join me up there? The winds are fantastic today."

"Thanks," Harry declined with his hands raised up, "but I think I have made enough of a fool of myself these past couple of days to last me for a while."

Confusion took shape on Viktor's sharp features. "How do you mean?"

"Well," Harry explained, "let's just say that watching you fly makes me feel kind of silly for ever thinking that flying was something I'm actually good at."

"Don't say that," Viktor answered with a furrowed brow, disconcerted in earnest. "That is ridiculous. You are a great flier, Harry."

"U2 makes nice music, too," Harry pointed out, "but I sincerely hope that Bono bloke doesn't believe he's Mozart."

"And yet it would be a shame if some nice band would stop playing their music just because Mozart lived before them, yes?"

Harry puffed up his cheeks, then conceded somewhat grudgingly, "Fair enough."

"When was your first time on a broomstick?" Viktor asked him after a pensive pause. "The magical kind, I mean."

"Just about three years ago," Harry answered a bit wistfully, remembering the overwhelming rush of exhilaration he had felt in that moment with a faint smile on his lips. "My first year at Hogwarts. I didn't even know flying broomsticks were a real thing before that."

"I was flying around on a broomstick before I could walk," Viktor affably told him. "At least that is what my mother keeps saying. And I have never gotten the hang of walking quite as good as flying, or so my father keeps telling me."

He smiled the most genuine smile Harry had ever seen on him at that, and Harry was maybe even more astonished to see the difference it made on his stern face. Perhaps every face was really made for smiling after all, in its own unique way, and it was only a matter of finding a reason for it to do so.

"And that is the only difference between you and me that is worth to mention," Viktor then added. "Time. Practice. Erm," he made a spinning motion with his finger, "Repetition! And Quidditch is pretty much the only thing I have to worry about, while from what I have heard it is safe to say that the same is not so true for you, yes? But you could be a great player if you keep doing it. And last time I checked, the English national team was in dire need of those."

They shared an unburdened laugh at that, and it took Harry a second or two to even realize the complete novelty of it, and only then did he suddenly and most inconveniently remember his original reason for coming there in the first place. Refusing to drop into a potentially awkward silence, Harry instead cleared his throat and composed himself to proceed ahead.

"Actually, though," he began as steadily as he could, "Quidditch wasn't what I came here to talk to you about."

When Viktor merely looked at him in wordless anticipation, Harry continued, if clumsily at first, "I mean, I would definitely prefer to just keep talking about Quidditch and your family and—and other… nicer things." He paused and shook his head. "But I came here to tell you something. To confess, frankly. And to apologize."

Viktor furled his considerable eyebrows in response to that and voiced what they already made so unmistakably clear. "I am not sure I understand."

"No," Harry perplexingly enough agreed with him, shaking his head again. "No, of course not. But I…" and now he nodded his head instead, "I mean to change that."

Two rather confused-looking people looked at each other for a moment of general confusion.

"So, uh," Harry carried on, "so I'll do that now. This is probably going to sound a little weird at first, and then it may continue to sound weird for the rest of your life, which is pretty much what Harry Potter is all about these days, but maybe it will eventually make some kind of weird sense to… to someone. So… here it goes."

He softly coughed into his hand once, then rubbed both his hands together as he inhaled some air, held his breath for a moment longer and finally spoke swiftly on its exhalation, "I lied to you, Viktor. On Monday, when you came to ask me about Hermione, I… I lied. I told you she already had a date for the ball and it was a lie and I knew it and I'm sorry. I knew it was wrong as soon as I did, too, but only today did I realize just how much of a mess I've made of things.

"You came to me in confidence, you made all your intentions known and you were ridiculously polite about it and I just flat-out lied to you like a total scumbag. Or an average Slytherin. It was complete bollocks. There isn't even a David Copperfield. I just made that up and I'm sorry. I truly am. And I can only hope that you haven't asked anyone else yet, so that you can ask out Hermione like you meant to and then you can go to the dance together and it'll almost be as if I never messed anything up."

Viktor's eyes broodingly roamed over their surroundings for a couple of seconds, and his silence kept Harry under unremitting tension. Then he fixed his gaze on the anxious boy before him once more, and after another pause finally spoke, "There is no David Copperfield?"

"Well, there… there is a David Copperfield, of course," Harry haltingly replied as soon as he was not too muddled to reply to the one question he could not have reasonably expected, "but he's an American stage magician, old enough to be Hermione's father, entirely unaware of her existence and actually dating Claudia Schiffer, I believe."

"What is a stage magician?" Viktor inquired further, his eyebrows drawn so close together they might as well have been one.

"Uh," Harry gave succinct utterance to his cerebral imbroglio, by now wondering what parts of what he thought he had said he had maybe just imagined saying. "It's, uh, it's a kind of illusionist? They perform physical, mechanical, optical... well, they perform all sorts of tricks for the entertainment of an audience. It's what Muggles actually refer to as magic, comically enough."

"Ah," said Viktor with a slow nod, his eyebrows relaxing only minimally.

Harry waited a moment for anything else to happen, and when it did not and there still seemed to persist a vaguely Copperfield-related contemplation around him, he ventured the forthright question, "So, have you asked anyone else yet? To the dance, I mean."

Viktor took a sharp breath, almost as if he had suddenly been roused from some standing slumber. "No," he said a little absently. "I have not."

"Well, that's—that's great!" Harry opined as cheerfully as he could, and there was even a part of him that fully meant it. The other part for once maintained its silence.

Viktor made some sort of nonverbal agreeing sound, if that was even what it was, and Harry in turn felt increasingly self-conscious about the whole situation, by now wondering if he had somehow managed to do an additional wrong in his attempt to right the first wrong. How many wrongs did it take to make a right, again? A dozen, perhaps?

"I suppose I'll be going, then?" he offered indecisively, making a tentative step backward. "I, uh, I don't know if you can forgive me or anything, but I hope you'll ask Hermione just as you were planning to. I mean, I know that thanks to my stupid meddling it's all a bit messy now and she already knows of your intention and all that, but that doesn't mean it's all ruined, right? It can still all end well, I think. At least Shakespeare said so. I think. You just have to ask her. She knows it's all my fault and I'm sure… I'm sure she'll say yes. So, uh… right."

He made another step away from Viktor, who showed no visible sign of any reaction as his eyes remained fixed on an indistinct spot on the ground, and mumbling one last apology and a, "See you around, then," Harry turned on his heels and proceeded to retreat. As he was walking away, he felt a curious sort of sensation overcome him with intense immediacy, as some kind of obscure affliction seemed to have left his chest that now felt lighter than it had in days. Yet it was with quiet dismay that he also felt that, while maybe his integrity was in part restored, his heart nevertheless seemed lost.

"Wait," Viktor's voice penetrated his discordant rumination, making him stop mid-step, "I am sorry." Harry turned around to face him in puzzlement, and Viktor met his gaze as he continued, "I did not mean to be rude. I was just a little… what is the right word? Overwhelmed, yes?" He made a thoughtful pause. "May I ask you one question?"

Harry hesitated solely out of surprise rather than reluctance, then walked back to where he had left his footprints in the thin but persistent layer of frost just seconds ago, saying, "Of course," and with a shrug of the shoulder added, "Anything." He then regarded Viktor expectantly with what he hoped would look like an encouraging smile, fixed as it felt on his taut features. Four or five seconds passed as Viktor seemed to be busy assembling the syntax of his question.

"Why?" was the strikingly monosyllabic result of aforementioned assembly.

"I can't help but fear that that's the first of your questions not referring to David Copperfield," Harry jokingly answered in an obvious evasion, and he was relieved to see the hint of a smile briefly curl up one corner of Viktor's thin lips.

"I would just like to understand," Viktor went on to explain. "I mean, I appreciate that you came here to tell me all this and I see now with my own eyes why Hermione always speaks so highly of you." When he found Harry averting his eyes in shame, he continued quite emphatically, "We all make mistakes, Harry. What separates some people from other ones is to answer for them and to take responsibility for the actions. Good character is not to do no wrong, but to see it and to try to fix it. And maybe not do it again, perhaps."

Harry gulped, his throat uncomfortably constrained all of a sudden. "Yeah, I… I'm afraid that's another test failed for me." When Viktor gave him a questioning look, he confessed to him with a despondent sigh, "I told the same lie to Cormac McLaggen, sans David Copperfield. Days before you came to me. When I lied to you, I _was_ actually doing it again."

"And clearly you don't regret it at all," Viktor remarked with a telling look, and a nervous chuckle escaped from Harry's lips.

"Well, Cormac isn't even half the person you are," he said, "but that's just an observation, not an excuse. Not for lying to him, and certainly not where patronizing Hermione is concerned, which is exactly what I have done with these stupid lies of mine. She was even grateful when she found out about Cormac this morning, thinking I had so nobly protected her from his bloated ego and blindingly white teeth. Can you believe it?" He scoffed bitterly, shaking his head at no one but himself. "Damn, I think I never messed up this badly, and I have crashed illegally flying cars into ancient trees that are basically under monumental protection before. Passively. Ron was actually in the driver's seat on that one. But still."

"I won't even ask," Viktor quipped with a wave of his hand. "About my actual question, though…"

"Right, right," Harry hastily picked up where he had not even properly left off, which really made him wonder where exactly he was. "Uhm… right."

"The way I understand it," Viktor commendably helped him along, "you lied to that Corbin McLeggings guy because he is not the kind of person you would want to be around Hermione, yes?"

"Well, sure," Harry agreed. "And also, maybe, just to get rid of him in general. I mean, again, it doesn't justify lying to him like that, I suppose, but… he _is_ the most obnoxious person outside of Slytherin."

"What about me then?" asked Viktor.

"About you?"

"Am I… what was the word… obnoxious, too?"

"What?" Harry asked, downright shocked. "No, no. Of course not! That's not what I meant to say here at all!"

"Then why tell me the same thing you told him? Apparently you don't want me around Hermione, either."

"No, that's not at all what… what I…" Harry helplessly trailed off, stranded in his own unavailing train of thought. "I mean, it's not… you're not… I was just—"

"Harry," said Viktor, and it really sounded like a statement of its own, and though calmly spoken made Harry not only stop his aimless stammering mid-sentence, but also prompted him to look up from wherever he had tried to find some much needed coherence. Once Viktor felt assured of his attention, he continued, "It is good of you to apologize for your lies, but I think there is still one person right here that you are still lying to in not so small way, yes?"

"Huh?" Harry breathed, genuinely mystified, and to his credit or not he actually looked around a bit in search for that one particular person. Witnessing that, Viktor pursed his lips – and it may have served to contain a smile that he deemed inappropriate in that moment.

"I am talking about you," he eventually clarified.

"You?" a positively flabbergasted Harry asked. "I mean, me?"

"The same, yes," Viktor confirmed. "I mean, you are also still lying to me a little bit, but I am not taking it personally, because I can see you are really trying to believe it yourself."

"I'm not lying to myself," Harry protested to the best of his ability, limited as it currently was. "That's ridiculous! I mean, how could I ever not know when I'm lying to myself, myself also happening to be me? I tell myself everything."

"Well, if it is all so simple, then surely you can answer this simple question," Viktor portentously declared. "Could it be that you lying to two different people has less to do with the people you lied to and more with the person you lied about?"

Hesitance kept Harry motionless, with the exception of his eyes that darted hither and yon and back again. Then he crossed his arms.

"What does it even matter?" he asked in a slightly peeved tone. "Why are we talking about this?"

Viktor expressed an apology, and strangely enough, no matter how often he did it, it never ceased to sound genuine rather than compulsive. "I did not mean to, er, interrogate you, but you seem to have a hard time figuring this out by yourself. Not so simple after all, yes?"

"Well, there's nothing to figure out, okay?" Harry all but snapped at him, regretting it instantly. Quickly calming himself he added in a softer voice, "I've messed it up. Let's leave it at that and… be done with it."

"That doesn't seem reasonable to me at all," Viktor opined, and Harry was pained to be reminded of Hermione at that. "I am sorry," the Durmstrang champion then said once more. "Maybe this is not my right, but I just think that you really need to speak with Hermione. And if it helps, I really think that she needs to speak with you too."

"I think she's had enough of that for a while, and I can't exactly hold it against her."

"I have the feeling that it would take a lot more to make Hermione refuse to listen to you."

Harry sullenly huffed at the notion, continuously shaking his head, his features hard.

"I'm not deserving of this," he muttered, bile and bitterness permeating his voice. "Any of it. I don't deserve to even have her in my life, and I think I have made that abundantly clear by now. I have taken her for granted for years now. I've gotten so used to her always being there for me that I neglected to take a moment and ask myself if I in turn am also there for her just as much. Does _she_ need _me?_ What do _I_ do for _her?_ But who cares, right? I need her and that's all that matters. I'd be dead by now if it weren't for her, that's for sure. And I haven't learned to truly cherish and appreciate her in over three years and then you come along and do it all in, what, six weeks? You've got it all figured out while I'm standing here lying to people like a bloody oaf because I don't know what to do about it myself. No, you can't ask her, mate, because I'm still pondering whether I should or shouldn't. Queue up, will you? I'm Harry flipping Potter after all. Gotta be good for something. Bugger!"

Viktor listened with no sign of impatience as Harry worked himself into his self-contemptuous tirades. Only when the young Gryffindor had finished and the last forceful puff of his breath had vanished erratically in the cold winter air did Viktor speak up again. "Don't you think it would be interesting to know Hermione's thoughts on some of these things?"

Harry threw him a discontented glance and made as if to speak in objection, yet merely ejected a flimsy sigh instead. "Why are you even doing this?" he asked, sincere in his incomprehension. "I came here, for all intents and purposes, to tell you that Hermione does in fact not have a date for that stupid ball yet and that you can still ask her yourself, and now you're basically telling me how life works and to pull myself together and do it myself instead? That doesn't make any sense!"

"Oh, do not get me wrong," Viktor replied. "I do envy you. I have never met anyone like Hermione before, and I have also not found anyone who is for me what the two of you apparently are for each other."

"Then why do it? Why step back from this and practically cheer me on from the sideline?"

Viktor's lips briefly spread into a transient smile, which this time, however, somehow made him look even sadder than his usual self. "Because it is not a competition," he stated matter-of-factly, then paused as Harry quizzically looked at him. "Hermione's heart is not something that can be won. It is either given freely, or not at all."

Harry blankly stared at him for a second, his mouth slightly agape. "See, you keep saying things like that and I'm left feeling like a little kid who thinks love is when you're holding hands in public."

"We cannot choose the time our hearts speak up."

"Seriously," Harry deadpanned. "Stop it."

Viktor gave a low, throaty chuckle at that and turned his gaze up to the overcast sky. "It is something Hermione said to me once. It is easy to sound smart when you have her to quote."

Harry mutely regarded him for a moment as he rummaged through his tumultuous thoughts, then exhaled an elongated sigh when at last he found what he needed to say. "I'm really sure she'd say yes if only you'd ask her, though."

"Maybe," Viktor allowed with a weak shrug. "I could see that happening, yes. I think she likes me good enough. But one should not forget we are talking about a little dance here, not a marriage proposal. There is maybe small difference there. Nowadays, at least."

With drooping shoulders Harry quietly shuffled his boots in the frosty, evenly cut grass, and when after an absentminded while his eyes briefly flickered up towards Viktor on their own accord and he found him watching him intently with the faintest hint of amusement tucked away in one corner of his mouth, Harry cleared his throat and made his feet stand still.

"I just don't know," he spoke his troubled mind. "I don't see why she would even listen to me after what I've pulled, let alone agree to accompany me to the very dance she has so vehemently condemned at any given opportunity."

It was Viktor's turn to sigh. "Am I correct to assume that you have not told her your real reason for lying to McBaggins and me?"

Harry's sudden interest in the wetly glistening traces his boots had left in the white-coated grass was a tacit admission, yet admission enough.

"Forget about the Yule Ball, then," Viktor told him decisively. "Don't make it about that in your head. Make it about her. Make it about your… heart's honesty, yes? Just tell her the truth and see what comes from it. It does not matter." Harry's eyes shot up at that, a doubtful look in them. "It does not matter," Viktor reiterated. "You do not do it for yourself and some result you are hoping for. You do it for her. Because she deserves nothing less."

Harry gulped, and it almost felt as if it had opened an actual knot somewhere in his windpipe. "You're right," he breathed, running his fingers across his forehead and then through his wayward hair. "Of course you're right. Damn it, why is everybody always right these days except for me?"

"Mind you," said Viktor, "if it turns out I was wrong about all of this after all, then I will be very surprised for one whole second and then I will be standing right in front of Hermione the second after that to ask her out myself."

Harry speechlessly stared at him, a pleasant smile momentarily banishing the shadows on the young man's features.

"Just do not mess it up," Viktor added, half in earnest, half in jest.

A slow and absent-minded shake of the head further emphasized Harry's continuing disbelief. "I don't even know what to say," he said, which evidently was something he knew to say. "A mere _thank you_ will hardly suffice. Ron would probably kill me, but I almost feel like I should ask you to the ball instead of Hermione."

Viktor laughed. "Now that would be something. We would certainly give the pesky press a thing to write about, yes?" Harry ejected a chuckle of his own, though his mental presence was still questionable at best. "Do not worry about it, though," Viktor, aware of Harry's frazzled state, told him in honesty. "I really do not think I have done anything special. I merely told a boy to talk to the girl that keeps talking about him."

Seconds passed in silence as Harry kept shaking his head and gazing into space while Viktor watched him in quiet amusement. "Well," the young man eventually broke the silence, "it is getting dark already, and I wanted to fly a little more, so I hope you will excuse me now."

Already he readied his Firebolt, letting the broom hover freely in the air right next to him and then deftly hopping onto it in one swift and fluent motion, the striking change in his posture once more taking immediate effect.

"Wait," Harry suddenly blurted out, and Viktor looked at him expectantly. "Insufficiency notwithstanding… thank you." The recipient nodded his head in response. "Really. From the bottom of my annoyingly conflicted, agonizingly youthful heart – thank you."

"I would wish you good luck," Viktor answered as he readjusted one of his dark leather gloves, "but I doubt you will need it. Being yourself should do it."

With a wink – a gesture Harry would not have imagined Viktor Krum to be capable of – the Seeker seasoned beyond his years kicked himself off the ground, darting up into the air with such dazzling speed that it was only a matter of seconds until once again no more than a blurry, elegantly moving silhouette remained to be seen of him. Harry watched him soar in quickly resurfacing awe, yet his admiration now had less to do with the maneuvers he witnessed and more with the person he knew to be performing them.

After seeing another succession of speedy loops and corkscrews, deft turns and moves he thought impossible, Harry eventually tore his eyes away from the mesmerizing sight to make his way back to the castle, where his heart's honesty was now awaiting him.

~Ω~


	5. Exposure

**• Chapter V •**

 **Exposure**

He had felt as ready as he ever had for anything in his life, and as prepared as he thought he could possibly be for something that nothing could ever have really prepared him for at all. He had felt readier than he had before entering the Forbidden Forest for the first time, on what he still felt was a somewhat questionable sort of detention for first year students, or before descending into the Chamber of Secrets to face a murderous basilisk, and certainly readier than he had before this year's first and very much dragon-involving task of the Triwizard Tournament – three independent events that shared the distinct similarity of barely having been escaped alive by him. And yet none of these things seemed to come even close to the intimidating magnitude of what he had nevertheless felt so ready to face that Friday night. It was therefore all the more regrettable that the one thing he had been so ready to face all evening long apparently, and in brazen disregard for his ebullient readiness, refused to be faced.

After his return to the castle in winter's fleeting twilight hours, he had first scanned the all too familiar interior of their cozy common room with all the acuity of his keen, myopic eyes – strictly refusing to let his readiness be deterred by the negligible fact that his glasses were still completely fogged. Her favorite little study corner by the window he found deserted, her preferred armchair in front of the fireplace occupied by a human sloth called Ronald Weasley. Him he had determinedly approached to inquire of him where the designated recipient of his readiness might be found, and having chosen these exact words he had left in irritation as he had been listlessly told to use his own hands like everybody else their age.

Slightly befuddled he had retreated into the dormitory, where he had quickly changed into a less multi-layered outfit before shortly after making his way to the Great Hall for their daily dinner, where to his left the human sloth had been habitually energized by the prospect of exuberant food supplies, while to his great dismay the seat to his right had remained as strikingly empty as the dishes and the neatly aligned cutlery in front of it had remained untouched. The sloth had neither known an answer nor, for that matter, shown much concern for the whole affair, as there was still a bowl of chocolate pudding to ingest.

Then, with his body properly heated up again after a pleasantly warming meal, he had wasted not a second more and as soon as he could declare dinner properly finished had taken his leave and made straight for the library, where he had looked for her first in that favorite booth of hers, then quite thoroughly and with increasing perplexity in every other aisle and corner except for the restricted section – to no avail.

In profound disappointment and with his mind otherwise preoccupied he had spent another hour or so doing homework back in the common room together with Neville, with Ron passively looking on in disbelief as he was not quite able to fathom why anyone would willingly do their homework on a Friday night, and before it would become the adequate matter of urgency in the evening hours of Sunday.

And still she had been nowhere to be seen.

Thus and with all that, nearly five hours after Harry had returned from the Quidditch pitch with an abundance of readiness, when the fourth year students of both Gryffindor and Ravenclaw gradually gathered in front of the entrance to the Astronomy Tower – also known among the inventive youth as the Snogging Spire – and Harry's drifting eyes finally caught Hermione joining up with them unobtrusively enough to escape everyone's awareness but his own, at her stirring sight he realized with immediate and unsettling clarity that he no longer felt ready at all.

Nonetheless making up his mind to step over to where she was standing with her eyes cast downward, it was Professor Sinistra's timely arrival that preempted him as the clock struck ten. With the animatedly chatting Patil sisters and all the other students trotting after the Professor up the spiral stairs, Harry hung back and positioned himself at the door to wait for Hermione.

"Hey, where were you?" he softly asked when she was just about to pass him.

"In bed, reading," she tersely replied, her eyes not once meeting his as she walked on by.

Harry's gaze followed her, a barely audible sigh escaping his lips. "The one place I didn't look," he mumbled solely to himself.

Anthony Goldstein and Terry Boot passed him next, and when Michael Corner followed behind he stopped and looked at Harry with a vexing smirk on his face. "Trouble in paradise?" he asked, his amusement unconcealed.

Harry regarded him with a scowl he himself was unaware of. "You'd have to ask somebody who's familiar with the place," he retorted somewhat sourly, prompting Michael to purse his lips and move along with an understanding nod of the head.

With no one else left behind but him, Harry waited for the echoes of chatter and footsteps to grow fainter, then noisily puffed out some air and finally set about ascending the many steps up to the top of the highest tower of the castle in anticipation of one exceptionally uncomfortable session of stargazing.

"Pairs of two, as per usual," Professor Sinistra was finishing her instructions a few minutes later with all the students now gathered around her on the roofed wooden platform in the center of the tower, where a large model of the Solar System freely levitated above their heads, the Sun's counterpart warmly aglow in its midst. And while the eight metallic globes surrounding it (Pluto was having an identity crisis, wondering whether he was a planet or not) were usually high enough to not interfere with any human activity on the platform, it was still quite possible to bang one's head against Jupiter once in a while, or worse, get one's hair entangled in the rings of Saturn. Especially if the model's motion was highly accelerated instead of being synchronized with the real planets' current positions in the actual Solar System.

Harry out of habit looked to Hermione as things around them got busy, for they usually tended to team up in most of the classes they shared. His smile was quick to falter when she merely threw him the briefest of glances, quietly saying, "I'll work with Neville tonight, if that's all right with you."

And even as she moved along already and Neville abashedly made a vaguely apologetic face at him, he managed to tonelessly mutter, "Sure," despite the acute lump in his throat as well as the all too evident lack of any interest in his opinion on the matter.

His shoulders dropped half an inch as he watched her go, while Ron, standing right next to him with that ridiculous bobble cap on top of his head, indifferently shrugged his own.

"Their loss," he blithely said. "Come on, mate. We'll show those buggers how to properly _astronomize_. You got your course book and your star chart, right? 'Cause I forgot to bring mine."

Harry's shoulders dropped an additional half an inch before he set out to follow his industrious friend.

Another thing that had dropped even further, though not just now but rather over the course of the day, was the temperature. The students had collectively come prepared, however, the lot of them – the girls generally more so than the boys – wrapped in multiple layers of shirts and sweaters, down jackets and thick coats, with house-colored scarves around their necks and fuzzy woolen caps and headbands up on top. It was nonetheless with great reluctance that they left the inviting warmth that the Sun's impressively large (and comparatively tiny) likeness actually radiated, stepping down the wooden stairs and off of the platform to set up their telescopes at the crenels on the outer part of the tower, all made of rigid and disagreeably cold stone.

With a dense formation of clouds slowly approaching them from the far north, they focused their work on the southern night sky that was as yet completely clear and speckled with distantly gleaming stars. Harry routinely went through the motions, oblivious to the fact that he was basically doing both their work for them as Ron stood by and watched him with increasing suspicion.

"Are you all right?" the young Weasley eventually asked his conspicuously reticent friend. "Wait, let me rephrase that. What's wrong with you?"

Harry did not immediately react to his friend's query, instead squinting at Sirius through his telescope's eyepiece without a word. He liked Sirius. At last he exhaled a long sigh, his condensing breath flimsily dissolving in the cold and vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

"My heart spoke up and it took me too long to translate what it was saying," he muttered, "and now the intended addressee of its message isn't listening anymore."

"Ah, yes," said Ron as he chafed his reddened hands. "That one. I had the same problem just last week. Maybe you should go see Madam Pomfrey about it, eh?"

"I didn't know she freely distributed arsenic these days," Harry answered drily, prompting Ron to eject a hearty _Hah!_

"Would that be for you or that _addressee_ of yours?"

"Me, definitely. Or you, if you don't start giving me a hand here soon."

"Hey, it's not like I wasn't trying to," Ron protested vehemently. "I'm right here, you know? But when you're already busy touching everything then what am I supposed to do?"

"As long as you aren't touching yourself – or me, for that matter – we should be fine," said Harry. "Now go on and grab that star chart."

"You know my scratchy handwriting is awful for this kind of thing."

"Then take the bloody telescope and give me the star chart."

"You know I can't tell one star from the other."

Harry swirled up from the eyepiece to shoot his bobble-capped friend an indignant frown, found the culprit grinning at him from ear to ear and shook his head at him instead, not entirely able to contain the smile that blossomed on his own face.

Harry did not know, but Ron was fairly sure that Harry did not actually want to talk about whatever it was that was bothering him, and thus he asked no more about it. Ron in turn did not know, but Harry would have told him he was right if only he had known what Ron was so fairly sure about. The good thing about understanding is, of course, that even in its tacit form it dependably serves to greatly improve all kinds of working conditions, and so they were indeed able to do what they were supposed to do in pleasant cooperation.

Harry preferred the time he spent on the telescope, for that was the more engaging part and the one that required the kind of focus – literal, visual focus – that made it quite impossible to peek elsewhere. Whenever Ron was the one squinting through the eyepiece, trying his best to tell one star from the other, and Harry was left leaning against the parapet with the sturdy star chart in his hand, he could not quite refrain from risking the occasional glimpse in Hermione's general direction, and he found it equally hard to prevent a small enough number of those glimpses to last far longer than what can reasonably be called a glimpse.

Watching her work with her distinguishing assiduity and quietly laugh with Neville did not help him much in tearing his eyes away from her, either. Yet for all his surreptitious glimpsing and slightly less subtle gawking, he nevertheless managed to completely miss each and every single time that Hermione risked a furtive glance in his direction.

The clock had not quite reached midnight yet when Professor Sinistra set about dismissing the class, as the sky now began to cloud over even in the south. As soon as all the equipment had been properly stowed away once more, the professor praised them all for their work and wished them a good night, receiving a dozen tired yawns and hardly intelligible mumbles in return as their last Astronomy class of the calendar year officially came to an end. Since it had also been by far the coldest one since the beginning of the new term, most of the students, even though they were generally rather fond of the class itself – if not always for strictly academical reasons – found it somewhat difficult to get too melancholy about it.

When Harry was just about to follow Ron down the stairway, his head seemed to have a head of its own as it turned quite automatically to throw a look over the shoulder it was attached to. Seeing Hermione still standing in the storeroom at the opposite side of the platform, he stopped even before touching down on the first step, and Ron, noticing his hesitance, turned around and quizzically looked up at him.

"I, uh," Harry set out to smoothly explain himself, "I just need to check on something. You go on ahead."

Ron arched a dubious eyebrow. "Well, as long as you aren't talking about jumping off the tower…"

"Yes, that's exactly it," Harry hastily babbled. "I spontaneously decided to find out what that feels like. I'll share my results with you in the morning. Good night, Ron."

Ron blinked at him blearily, his eyes struggling to remain even as much as half-open. "I'm friends with crazy people," he muttered just as he turned on his heels and resumed descending the corkscrew stairs.

When his friend had disappeared around the bend, Harry glanced about to ascertain if anybody else was still up there with them, found no sign of anyone's presence but theirs and finally, inhaling a deep breath of cold air to fight the tiredness he had felt spreading out into his limbs over the last hour or so, plucked up all his alleged Gryffindor courage and walked over to the other side of the platform, his light sneakers barely causing the faintest noise on the large and sturdy oaken floorboards.

He silently watched Hermione in the storage room as she carefully put something into a cabinet, closed a couple of drawers and then doused all the candle lights in the room at once with a single wave of her wand. She stepped outside as she tucked away her trusted tool of magic in the inside of her coat, then closed the door behind her. When she turned around and had just made one step away from the door, she looked up and gave a jump, ejecting an audible squeak and stopping dead in her tracks.

"Harry?" she asked uncertainly, her utter surprise at first even evident in the unusual shrillness of her voice. "Is that you?"

Harry, who had just mirrored her jolt as he was abruptly wrenched out of his thoughts by her reaction to his presence, realized only now that he had the glowing model of the Sun as the brightest source of light right behind him and that she was probably completely unable to discern his facial features. Appearing like a clandestine assassin was just the way he had planned to set things off, really. He made a mental check mark.

"Yeah, sorry," he quickly apologized, making a step to the side so that some of the light fell onto his face, though that admittedly made him feel more exposed than he would have liked. "Didn't mean to startle you there."

"That worked out really well for us," Hermione remarked not unkindly.

"As most of my plans tend to do," Harry mumbled mostly to himself.

Hermione gave him a look that even in the dimness at the edge of the light successfully communicated to him exactly what she thought of that. "We have survived so far," she had him consider, "and looking at what we've been through, that is not to be taken for granted."

Harry meant to remind her that it hardly ever had been _his_ plans that had accomplished that, yet he thought better of it before the first syllable could roll off his tongue. He would have been sincere, of course, but so would she have been in her predictable dissent. "Anyway," he instead changed the course back to pertinence, "I, uh, really would like to talk to you, if… if you'll let me."

"Maybe," she replied somewhat teasingly, tentatively stepping down the two curved steps that connected the central platform and the storage area. "Unless, of course, you mean to regale me with the most recent Quidditch championship results, or Dylan Englewood's _Phallus Maximus_."

"Oh, you've heard of that too?"

"Must I remind you that we share the same red-headed acquaintance?"

"Right," Harry said with a curt nod and a faint smile, then smoothly drifted into the silent realization that he had somehow managed to lose the perfect approach to what he had actually come there to say and which had been right there in his mind just seconds ago. He threw a nervous glance over to Hermione and found her looking up at the floating models of the planets, and for a moment was further distracted by the way the curls of her hair spilled out from underneath her knit woolen hat, over her red and gold scarf and down her shoulders clad in black. When exactly had she begun doing these things with her hair? How many different things could one do with hair? And, perhaps most importantly, why did none of them work on his?

Just when he had entirely lost the thought about his previous loss of another thought, Hermione's eyes suddenly gazed straight at him, and he quickly averted his own.

"Right," he reiterated. "So, I talked to Viktor earlier. He was very understanding, all things considered."

Where the words had come from he could not say. What he did know, however, was that this had most definitely not been part of the perfect approach he had originally conceived of, whatever exactly that had been.

"Oh, so I wasn't understanding enough, then?" Hermione asked him with the slightest edge to her voice. "Is that what you're saying?"

Harry looked well-nigh horrified at that. "No, that's not—I… I don't expect you to understand anything!" He looked more than horrified following that, while Hermione for her part looked more perplexed than indignant, though she had hardly enough time to decide which one of the two was the more appropriate reaction.

"No, wait!" Harry hastily paddled back and forth at the same time, all at sea. "I fully expect you to understand everything, because that's what you usually do. I just don't expect you to understand me!"

She crossed her arms and shifted her weight from one leg to the other, not once taking her inauspiciously narrowed eyes off him.

"Merlin's flipping beard!" Harry lamented aloud. "What am I even talking about?" He sighed in frustration with himself. "Maybe… maybe I should just start over?"

"By all means," Hermione readily concurred with a sweeping motion of her hand.

"Right," said Harry once again, therewith evoking the hazy image of a broken record somewhere in the recesses of his mind. He continued not solely in defiance of that mental imagery, "So, what I wanted to say was that I talked to Viktor earlier… I think I did actually manage to say that much already, but… anyway, I talked to him and I told him everything. Yeah. He, uh, had a rather unique perspective on the whole matter, and while I'm not entirely sure I share his confidence in some of the, uh, conclusions he arrived at, I… uhm. Well, I suppose the important thing right now is that no matter how often and how sincerely I apologize to you for what I've done, I still owe you an explanation. That's what I meant with that disaster of an introduction. Basically."

Hermione listened patiently, watching him intently as he spoke, his own eyes wandering mostly over the floor and the outer columns and Mars and Venus and anything demonstrably non-human in between. "Okay," she enunciated once he had paused for so long that Hermione suspected this to be one of those moments where one had to manually press Start to continue. "I—I'm listening."

"Righ—" Harry pursed his lips and shook his head. "No. Yes. Okay. So..." He cleared his throat. "As for that overdue explanation for my regrettable actions, I reckon the most straightforward approach would be to say," and then he just blurted out in one breath, "that my reason for lying to both Cormac and Viktor about you was that I didn't want either of them to ask you to the Yule Ball."

He swallowed, feeling as if his squirming insides could not quite believe this piece of information had just left the relative security of his own mind. It was somewhat underwhelming and mildly upsetting that, despite the moment's undeniably enormous gravity, Hermione seemed markedly unfazed.

"Well," she slowly spoke in deep contemplation, "I gathered as much this morning, as you know, and I could even understand it as far as Cormac is concerned. And while it may be argued that neither of them deserves to be lied to per se, Viktor surely has done nothing at all to deserve such a prejudiced dismissal. You hardly know him at all. Besides... and you know that I appreciate how caring and protective you are, I really do, but... Harry, you're not my father and we are in fact closer to the twenty-first century than we are to the nineteenth. There's really nothing to protect me from here."

The essential difference between these two particular kinds of gravity was, as it appeared, that in the case of the less scientific and more figurative one, one could remain perfectly unaffected by it as long as one was equally unaware of it, which was something that Harry had to seriously consider for a moment before continuing.

"I think you mistake my meaning," he told her with a modicum of hesitance, almost as if he was making sure that he was actually understanding his meaning himself. She looked at him with minor confusion and a greater amount of curious expectancy commingled in her expression. "While I basically did the same exceptionally stupid thing twice," he continued, "I would say that—that my reasons for doing so were distinctly different on those two occasions."

The confusion on Hermione's face increased by a few degrees. "How so?" she asked, her voice neutral.

"Well, you see, the thing is—" he broke off and sighed. There was no way around it, and no better way of saying it than the least convoluted one. It was time to take heart, then, and make his heart known. He threw her a probing glance, yet with a last remaining ounce of trepidation found himself unable to fully meet her constant gaze as he uttered the words, "I lied to Cormac because I couldn't imagine you'd ever say yes to him, and I lied to Viktor because I feared you might."

Silence. Feeling like the whole tower should be collapsing beneath him right now from all the weight he felt pushing down on him, to graciously bury him forever in its ruins, he risked another peek or two in Hermione's general direction when no sign of a response of any kind made itself known after a couple of seconds. Surely the gravity was setting in by now, and he deemed it a good sign that she was at the very least still standing there and had refrained from bolting straight off the tower.

"I don't think I quite follow," she then declared not only somewhat anticlimactically, but also highly uncharacteristically. She shook her head ever so slightly. "What d'you mean by that?"

This was slowly but surely proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated – and for totally unforeseeable reasons as well.

"Uh," he aptly noted, "I… well, I think I mean exactly what I'm saying. For a change."

"And what is it you are saying, exactly?"

Handling the increasingly entangled situation with his renowned aplomb, he gulped. "Isn't that obvious by now?" he asked her somewhat shakily as he regarded her with a nervous, lopsided smile. "I meant to ask you myself. Eventually. Possibly. Almost definitely."

She pulled her eyebrows together, the eyes below rapidly darting from side to side. "Ask me what?"

Harry, in turn, hunched his shoulders and spread out the palms of his hands in front of him. "Tuh—to the ball? Ask you to go to the ball… with me?" He made a succession of pointing motions with his fingers: first at her and then himself, and then somewhere else entirely, though the direction he pointed in had nothing to do with the location where the actual Yule Ball would be taking place, for even in the wondrous realms of magic it was no walk in the proverbial park to make whole ball rooms float right above a lake without any physical support to speak of.

Nicely going along with her knit eyebrows, Hermione now also narrowed her eyes to slits, in consequence looking like somebody trying very hard to read very tiny letters. She scrutinized him like that for a moment, then reclined her head a little and turned it ever so slightly to the side, therewith looking at him askance. Then, when a few additional seconds had passed, she inhaled a sharp breath as her lower jaw dropped an inch. Still staring at him with her mouth agape, she then apparently discarded one thought in favor of another and closed her mouth again. And just when Harry began to think that, assuming anything that had ever been put under a microscope had actually been aware that it was under a microscope, this was surely what it must have felt like, she suddenly relaxed – which at this point in time was immensely confusing in and of itself.

"Oh," she exhaled meaningfully, seeming oddly pleased with herself for some cryptic reason. "You mean because of Cho, right?"

"Cho?"

"You thought since the person you actually wanted to ask was already going with somebody else you could just ask me to accompany you as a friend because there really was no one else that you really wanted to ask," Hermione recited her deduction with dazzling speed, and she did not do so accusingly or resentfully at all. She simply sounded as if she were taking an oral exam. She did not anticipate that she was actually failing it.

Harry decisively shook his head, however, and found that it was about time to furrow his own brow. "Nuh-uh?" he said, and it was not as much of an actual question as it was a statement with a botched emphasis. "I didn't find out about Cho and Cedric until after my little incidents with Cormac and Viktor, and I never actually cared about it. At all. Cho is pretty and seems nice, but I don't really know the first thing about her. I lied to them because they were both planning to ask the only person I was truly considering to ask myself, and I had such a hard time making up my mind to finally do it because she also happened to be my best friend and I was the only one out of the three of us with something to lose."

Having raised his voice a bit with a courage born out of desperation, the silence that followed felt abrupt and somehow more complete than before. He took a moment to compose himself and waited for his breathing to normalize a little, then added more calmly, "And I… I would really appreciate it if you could go back to understanding what I'm saying now, because it's bloody confusing when you don't."

When once more no answer came and Harry again looked at her to gauge her status, he found that her gaze by now was so distant he thought she might be able to see the Big Bang. A succession of rapid twitches of her eyelids portended her return to the present world.

"Bu—but… but Cho," she stammered helplessly. "You said Cho." He gave her a quizzical look, which surprisingly she was aware enough of to expound almost as if in a more or less lucid dream, "In the library. You said Cho."

He thought about that for a moment, trying to recall that specific part of their previous exchange. "I think what I actually said was _Chuh_."

She stared at him, or at some point vaguely located on his chest – vapidly, right through him, her eyes glazed over. Then she blinked once, hard. "I need to sit down."

Harry, afraid she may yet faint – and most likely not even for the right reasons, if those even existed outside of a Hollywood movie – instinctively made a few steps forward and extended a helping hand towards her, while Hermione – awareness of her surroundings debatable – was already turning away from him, making him smoothly continue the motion of the hand he had intended to offer her in support to the back of his head instead to scratch himself in skillfully concealed embarrassment, with Hermione sitting down on the higher of the two wide steps behind her.

"Sure, okay," he casually commented. "Let's just, uh, sit down." And even as he spoke he joined her, careful though to leave some space between them because he felt that was the appropriate thing to do. He was just beginning to appreciate the view this new vantage point presented him as he looked up at the motion of the little, faintly glowing planets on their elliptical orbits above them, when his eyes decided to stray off to the side, where Hermione was likewise gazing up. She was following bright blue Neptune on its smooth and constant course, and when it passed them by she tilted her head back as it was almost right above them, and continuing to follow its path her head ended up swirling on and away from it, her eyes finally ending up meeting Harry's.

For a moment, time seemed to have stopped. But it hadn't.

"I think I'd actually prefer to stand," Hermione hastily spluttered, already jumping to her feet. "Maybe walk a little. Right over here. Stay warm and—and healthy."

Harry quickly followed suit as far as the standing was concerned, though he stiffly remained rooted to the spot and felt awfully self-conscious about it. "Right," he said for no apparent reason. "Health is good." And with that they had effectively switched positions relative to their original setup now, with her pacing up and down near the glowing orb of the Sun's likeness and him standing at the foot of the stairs.

"Listen," he eventually spoke up when the silence became unbearable and he just did not know what else to do, "I… I didn't mean to put you in an awkward position, here. And I don't expect you to say anything. You really don't have to. I mean, it would be nice if at some point you would talk to me again, generally, but right now I just needed to put an end to these asinine lies and tell you the whole truth, no matter what. I hope that's not actually selfish, too. I just felt so miserable these past couple of days, Hermione. I had actual chest pains, feeling like there was some kind of—of beast in my chest or something, wrapped around my revolting heart and constantly eating away at it. Figuratively, of course. Not like… like in _Alien_. Heck, I don't even know what I'm talking about. Please say something?"

She came to a halt at that, her silhouette sharply defined against the luminous backdrop, the fiery orange light spilling out from behind her.

"I'm afraid I'm having some trouble processing this information," she declared in almost robotic a fashion, conveying the impression to Harry that she was a decidedly female and less yellow version of Data from _Star Trek_.

"Should I be calling customer service?" he quipped as he casually, or almost casually, walked over to join her near the model Sun, yet the joke fell flat – if only because Hermione was unable to process the information. Harry cleared his throat and, considerately leaving a couple of meters between them, busied himself with admiring the model's textured, fluctuating surface: the granules and the sunspots and the whole color spectrum from brightest yellow to deepest red and specks of near-black. The model – small merely in relation to what it represented – dominated the platform with its considerable size and looked more impressive than the real Sun did to the naked eye. And it did not actually burn the naked eye, which was also nice.

"I don't believe," Hermione pensively spoke up after a while, "that I have ever before felt more overwhelmed or more bewildered at any point during my life than I do right now."

"That doesn't necessarily sound all that bad…" Harry mused aloud, yet trailed off as Hermione threw him an absent kind of glance before her eyes wandered on, never quite finding anything specific to settle on.

"I woke up this morning," she continued as if she had not even heard him talk, "in a familiar world that made a certain sense to me. A world that I had a sort of implicit agreement with about the things that perhaps still could or most likely would happen in my life, and those that would most probably not. And I was fine with that… content, even. At least I tried to be. But now, not even eighteen hours later, I can bid that world adieu, since – evidently – it doesn't care at all about our little agreement."

"That does sound a wee bit bad…"

"A wee bit?" she asked with more than a pinch of disbelief, for once at least reacting to him directly. "I understand more than half of the things that happened today less than half as much as I should like, and I'm not yet sure if I like even half of them half as much as they demand."

"Well, that—that definitely sounds… vaguely confusing, actually."

"I mean," Hermione once more went on as if she were talking but to herself, "I have, despite my best efforts to find distraction in some light Russian literature, spent the larger part of the afternoon and, for that matter, the evening, trying to make sense of all these oddities – the things you did and why you could possibly have done them. The easiest explanation, it seemed, was that you did in fact simply take me for my word, assumed that my outspoken disdain for certain traditions was the unnuanced truth of the whole matter and, acting upon it, merely intended to spare me the time and trouble of turning down Cormac and Viktor myself.

"And yes, in a few fleeting moments, mere fractures of a second, and yet with an unnerving kind of persistence, the question flashed through my mind: could you have done it because you didn't actually want anyone to take me to the dance for some reason of your own? Mind you, it struck me as completely outlandish and I only entertained the thought at all thanks to my bothersome tendency to try and consider every possible answer and potential solution to a problem that I can think of, but… there it was.

"And I wondered, and I pondered, and nothing made any sense. Not even the thing that made a particular kind of sense made real sense to me, if that makes any sense to you. And now here you are, telling me that you indeed wanted to ask me to the dance yourself, thereby taking the last ounce of sense from me I thought I could safely hold onto. And all I can think to ask is that one old question that curious children love to ask so ceaselessly, and that some people are left asking even at the very end of things: why?"

Completely taken in by her words and unable to tell whether her question was actually directed at him or rather rhetorical in nature, Harry stared at her with his mind as frozen as his body, and she met his eyes unflinchingly. Seconds passed before she spoke in elucidation, "Why would you want to ask _me?_ "

Eventually Harry overcame his hesitance and asked her in return, "How many different reasons are there to do that kind of thing, really?"

Hermione cocked her head to the side. "Roger Davies asked Fleur Delacour because he, like everybody else, couldn't resist her Veela charms and she probably accepted because she deemed him just handsome enough to not embarrass her. Seamus asked Lavender because he finds her _reasonably dishy_ and reckoned her to be so easily excitable that she might just say yes to the first bloke that asks her. Hagrid asked Madame Maxime because you don't meet a half-giantess any day of the week. Draco Malfoy allowed Pansy Parkinson to ask him because they both agree on the crucial point that he's the most desirable entity in the entirety of the universe. And Fred apparently asked Angelina to chaff Ron, and I'm pretty sure George is the one who actually likes Angelina, so I won't even pretend to understand what exactly is going on there, but… yeah. That's the gist of it, I suppose. Just a small sample size, of course."

"Oh," said Harry, and it was fundamentally sincere. "I, uh… see."

And whatever it was that he was seeing, it was apparently somewhere around his feet. Hermione gave him a couple of seconds to gather his thoughts, but when she could not be sure anymore that he was even having any, she tried a verbal nudge. "Well?"

"Hm?" it vaguely came from him in what might or might not be called a response.

"Harry?" she said, and it carried a certain weight that made him look up at her attentively.

"Yes?"

"D'you…" Her voice momentarily failed her and he could see her eyelids flutter nervously. "Do you… like me?"

"Of course I like you," he was quick to reply. "We've been friends for years! How could I not li—"

"Harry."

"Yes?"

"You know that's not what I meant."

"Right," he bashfully admitted. "Yeah, I guess… I guess I do."

A quiet ensued that was almost as contemplative as it was awkward as Hermione wondered what exactly his ambiguous words were referring to and Harry expected her to still be waiting for a proper answer with growing impatience, since he of course knew that he had not been referring to the question posed so meaningfully. He rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, unconsciously brushing over the thin top end of the lightning-shaped scar that would forever mark him as the one he was, for better or for worse.

"Remember last week?" he eventually spoke up, his voice soft and subdued. "Our studying session in the library? Of course you do, because why wouldn't you?" He shook his head, annoyed with himself but quick to pursue his concern, "Remember what I said about… certain people and… how did you phrase it? That thing about people and events. Something like, special people—"

"Can make ordinary events very memorable," she completed with a small, faintly timid but nevertheless pleasant smile.

"Exactly," Harry agreed with a nod, and his lips mirrored hers quite of their own accord. With their gazes suddenly locked with unforeseen intensity, however, both their smiles slowly faded into expressions of a different and more daunting kind of significance. Feeling his heart beating madly in his chest and fearing he was about to lose his ability to speak completely, the gleaming depth of her wide dark eyes made the truth of his following words all the more tangible as he uttered with a relinquishing sigh, "I was talking about you."

She stared at him with her lips slightly parted, and he could almost feel her breath brushing lightly over them in quick short bursts. "Me," she whispered weakly as her eyes drifted off, and it was impossible to discern whether it was a statement or a question, sounding mostly like a faint echo of some deep-set disbelief.

Desperate to avoid what would presently be unbearable silence and equally determined to make his heart known as best he could, now or never, Harry went forth in brave surrender, "I was hoping that you would agree with me, you know? I didn't repeatedly bring it up to annoy or even taunt you, which I hope you didn't actually assume, but only in hope of getting some sign – any sign at all – that maybe there was something else beneath your furious damnation of all things dance-related. That perhaps you too would feel that with just the right person at your side... well, you know how it goes.

"And then, when I heard you talk about Viktor… heard you say how he made you feel, how he was the first man to make you feel like one of those women from those silly little novels you sometimes like to read, I thought to myself, 'Damn, I would've really liked to be that man.' But hell, I'm not even a man! I'm just a boy whose heart speaks in a language of its own. A boy who's been growing ever fonder of his best friend without understanding what any of it meant. A boy who, quite frankly, feels too young for these things. Too young to live up to what he feels these things should be.

"And although none of this is an excuse for what he did, it is an explanation and it is the truth. Maybe a lot of people only do the wrong thing because they are afraid to do the right one, even though deep down they know what it is. I don't know. I just need you to know that I'll be fine even if you don't feel like this at all about me. And if maybe you do actually want to go to the ball with Viktor, you don't have to worry about me either. I understand, really. And he's… he's great, honestly. You were right. I don't know if there's anyone I would deem truly deserving of you, but if there is, I think it's him."

He paused for air alone, a brief respite for his racing heart and for his struggling lungs. He dared a cautious look at Hermione as she was standing there in front of him, her frame still so delicate somehow even in layers of winter clothes. He was surprised to find that she had closed her eyes. Her head was slightly tilted downward, a single curly strand of hair dangling loosely at the side of her face. Her features were painted softly in all the fiery hues of the warm light emanating in gentlest waves from the Sun-like sphere right next to them.

He could see the length of her eyelashes and wondered if he had ever noticed them quite like this before, and he also wondered how the very same multicolored hat she was wearing would make him look totally ridiculous while it somehow managed to look so cute on her, which did not seem fair to him at all. His mind did not linger on that particular thought for very long, however, as the mesmerizing sight of her lips made him wonder more deeply, more stirringly what it could possibly feel like to touch them with his own. Yet even though there was no more than one determined step left between the two of them, they appeared very distant to him in that moment. Unreachable, even.

"I just need us to not be changed by this, okay?" he said in a near-whisper, his voice bereft of its energy but not at all of its sincerity. "I need you to be my friend and to let me be yours. Whatever happens, that's the most important thing to me. And maybe that's what I really, really wanted you to know, because I'm not sure I've ever said it before. And I'm sorry for that. And I think I'll stop talking for good now, because otherwise I'll probably just keep babbling away and I—I… yeah."

A barely perceptible stir went through Hermione's body, though no change reached her expression, her eyes remaining shut. "I wish… I wish I could let you into my thoughts right now," her voice unsteadily reached his dazed mind. He had not noticed her opening her eyes or raising them to look at him. He had, at first, only seen the quiescent curves of her lips morph into fluid waves of speech, and they went on to say, "To make you understand what I fear I cannot put into words right now. Nothing I can think of saying or doing seems right to me, and—"

At that Harry averted his eyes and dropped his head.

"See?" she asked, her voice imbued with desperation. "Everything I can say or do has implications or connotations that I don't intend to communicate and yet I do and I don't know how to avoid it – how to avoid hurting you. You said it yourself. I have no idea how to do the right thing. I don't even know what the right thing is. I'm too bloody confused! And so all I'm left with are the wrong things. All the wrong things. If only I could make time stop for a moment – make it wait for me to catch up! I just… I just—"

"It's okay," he tried to assure her, to soothe her to the best of his ability and as much as the situation allowed. He looked up at her and tried to muster an understanding smile, yet the unshed tears he found glistening in her eyes made it falter even before it was properly set. "It's okay," he repeated, his voice breaking a little despite his best effort. "Really. I didn't mean to make you feel like this. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. And I too would like to find something I can say or do to make it go away – to make you feel better. But neither of us can, I'm afraid. Not right now. Maybe this is just one of those times where words just don't work the way you want them to anymore, and where what you actually need is simply some time and… distance."

He stumbled over that last word a little, feeling as if it had left a particularly tight knot in his throat and a most unsettling feeling in his chest. Not like the weight from before, but rather some sort of hollowness. Yet he pushed himself to continue, "And maybe… maybe I'll walk away now and leave. Just for now. Maybe that will be for the best. For the both of us. I don't want to make it any worse, but I just don't know what else to do. And maybe you need this as much as I'm afraid I do right now. I… I'm sorry."

He gave her one last fleeting look that she was barely aware of, and as he moved past her – their shoulders lightly grazing one another for the briefest moment – she knew somehow that with a single word she could make him stop, or else in silence let him walk.

The night remained quiet but for the sighing of the wind.

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Rings of Saturn:_ Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings, you know, but everybody only ever mentions those of Saturn. Stupid sexy Saturn.

 _The common fauna of the thorax:_ If I'm not mistaken this is the second time across my stories that I've referred to the canonical "beast/monster/creature in his chest" thing, while putting my own spin on it because back when I read the books I always found its canonical usage a bit perplexing. And once again, besides using it as a representation of Harry's guilt-ridden conscience instead of lust, I also equated it to the lovely little chestburster from the 1979 cinema milestone _Alien._ Now the Xenomorph and I, that was love at first sight, let me tell you. And what can I say? I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality. Its structural perfection is only matched by its hostility. Luckily for us, they mostly come at night. Mostly.

 _Homage to a Hobbit:_ Hermione at some point utters something of a paraphrased version of that delightfully clever part of Bilbo's speech that he gives on the occasion of his 111th (and Frodo's 33rd) birthday, as read in _The Fellowship of the Ring,_ first published in 1954, or seen in the corresponding movie adaptation everybody knows. Yeah, yeah. The movies are fine. They just completely ruined Faramir. No hard feelings. And Aragorn is, quite frankly, a fundamentally different character as well. And how about Barad-dûr, the _dark_ tower, with that searchlight darting hither and thither as if Sauron just dropped his contact lenses? And that one change, where that thing is not where it's supposed to be? Hey, I'm cool. Water under the bridge, right? Breathe, Stanrick. Breathe.


	6. Inertia

**• Chapter VI •**

 **Inertia**

While she had not exactly been giddy with excitement when Hagrid had pulled those tiny balls of fur out of the heavy wooden box he had put onto an alarmingly wonky table outside of his hut, she could certainly have imagined worse. Although it was undeniably regrettable that ever since the Malfoy incident in their very first lesson over a year ago Hagrid had been so intimidated and downright frightened to cause any more trouble in his class, and – in direct consequence – possibly disappoint Dumbledore and lose his newfound vocation as an official member of the Hogwarts teaching staff, Hermione knew all too well of his easily triggered and well-nigh uncontrollable enthusiasm for things he considered fun, while his uniquely skewed half-giant perspective simultaneously and most severely limited his ability to discern the levels of danger all those fun things potentially posed to people lacking the benefit of skin twice as hard and thrice as thick as leather.

And while it may have been reasonably argued that a moderately increased amount of boldness pertaining to his curriculum could have worked wonders regarding the students' excitement for his class, Hermione was well aware of Hagrid's notorious difficulty with moderation of any kind, and for that reason concluded that instead of letting all the fun razor-toothed, hair-pulling, venom-spewing, rear-exploding magical menagerie loose on them that she had no doubt he was secretly still yearning for, it was more advisable to play it safe. Even a little too safe. Better safe than sorry, after all. A mantra she wished her two foolhardy friends could at least try to be a bit more mindful of at times.

For these reasons as well as others, Hermione refrained from joining either the mostly masculine yawns of boredom and sighs of disappointment or the markedly feminine squeals of delight at the sight of cute little fuzzy things, which may in parts also have been shrieks of musophobic panic attacks. Hermione oftentimes found it almost as hard to discern what exactly girls were on about as she found it fundamentally impossible to determine whether boys were actually on about anything worth mentioning at all, and to make matters even worse both these observations appeared to be perfectly interchangeable.

The lesson itself went about as spectacularly as one would have expected. The prospect of handling a creature that is able to adopt certain aspects of organisms it comes into direct contact with was undeniably intriguing, but the curiosity was as quick to wane as the disillusionment was sure to follow when those aspects turned out to primarily revolve around the color of their fur and some marginally erratic behavior. This was certainly not the kind of insight about herself Hermione would have hoped to gain. She _did_ know her own hair color, and if that little Fluffball running constantly and indefatigably across her hands into one and the same direction was supposed to be an abstract mirror of her own being, it was a tad too cynical for her taste.

Further adding to her indignation was the regrettable fact that there was as yet no way to quench her thirst for understanding how exactly those little fellows managed to do what they did so effortlessly. The sorry state that the magical sciences were in had irked her ever since setting a first curious foot into this newly discovered world, brimming with mind-boggling possibilities. And yet far too many inquiries into the more intricate workings of magic ended – even today, on the verge of the twenty-first century and in circles that should frankly be held to higher standards – with the utterly unsatisfactory answer, "Well, it's magic." Which was, of course, not an explanation at all, but merely a lazy excuse for neglecting to keep looking for one.

And thus another lesson of Care for Magical Creatures truly lived up to its name and had two dozen students taking more or less responsible care of inexplicably magical creatures with minimal academic aspirations. So whenever she was not talking to Harry as she sat there at his side on their rather enormous tree stump with Ron loafing about right behind them, she was listlessly observing the almost spherical hamster thingy in her hands while silently humming _I Can't Get No Satisfaction_ inside her head, sometimes rephrasing the chorus to _I Just Want An Explanation_.

It hardly came as a surprise that the most surprising turn of events that morning had nothing to do with the class itself, but rather appeared in the shape of Viktor Krum. One curious half of Hermione's brain did not quite want to admit it to the deprecating other half, but at the unexpected sight of him at least that one half wondered if maybe he would want to talk to her, and if – maybe – the reason for that could be one particular question she recently had found herself wondering about. That is, whether he could possibly be planning to ask her said question, as she had come to suspect over the course of the time they had spent together every now and then. There had been certain indications, reluctant as Hermione had initially been to interpret them as such.

So when it turned out that it was in fact Harry he actually wished to speak with, both her cerebral hemispheres joined together for maximum confusion and curiosity, especially when she realized that she was not even sure whether she was disappointed or relieved – or something indistinguishable in between the two. She was struggling with more than a minor case of ambivalence in regard to the Yule Ball and herself. It was a volatile kind of mixture, really.

Such were her muddled thoughts as she took Harry's black-furred Fluffball into her cupped hands and watched him walk away with Viktor following in his wake, though the latter did not depart before most anachronistically taking a bow and bidding her farewell. The reserved young man truly was so courteous he would make the Queen look rude. The only royal thing about Hermione, meanwhile, was the warm flush she felt spreading on her cheeks. More welcome than that particular source of warmth was the heat emanating from the two magical rodents in her hands. It was a different sensation that made her switch her attention back to them, however: a striking lack of hectic and incessant movement.

And indeed, her own Fluffball had apparently – and thankfully – found a reason to discontinue its relentless marathon after all, though its whereabouts had obviously, and despite all the running, not changed at all. A concept that rodents in general did not seem to have much of a problem with. Then again, even the majestic Homo sapiens could at times be observed doing much the same in his very own version of the hamster wheel. And better yet, they were known to be willing to pay for it. In fact, if any known species could claim to have mastered the absurd art of running on and on without ever getting anywhere, it surely had to be them. At least it hat gotten them to the moon. Well done, Sisyphus!

Hermione's Fluffballs, on the other hand, appeared to be quite content just where they were, and watching them greet each other so cordially brought a smile to her face, mostly hidden behind her red and gold scarf. From a read-through or two of _Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them_ – the _Monster Book of Monsters_ would certainly have nothing to say about the likes of _Magimus Versicapillus_ – she knew that, once they had properly begun assimilating to another organism, they would keep the acquired properties for a time far longer than the process itself had taken them. Therefore, Harry's Fluffball was still very much his and would remain so for hours or even days without ever getting into contact with him again, and Hermione found herself freshly enthused at the prospect of getting to observe the interactions between Fluffballs of two different hosts. Maybe something interesting would happen at last.

They definitely seemed to be rather happy to see each other, and Hermione would have expected nothing else. Frankly, she would have been outright insulted if the two quadrupeds had not shown appropriate amounts of esteem for one another. It was without concern and instead with some quiet amusement that she witnessed their exchange, nudging each other with their tiny pink noses and snuggling up to each other side by side. There was nothing disconcerting about it at all, since those were just their limited ways of expressing their fondness of one another. Eloquence simply was not their forte, and Hermione was fully willing to not hold that against them.

She threw a glance over to where Harry and Viktor were standing, feeling eager to show Harry their little counterparts. They seemed to be deep in conversation, however, and Hermione did not wish to intrude. And while she did not usually conceive of herself as particularly nosy, she could not help but wonder what the two might be talking about. Quidditch-related small talk would have been a little odd under the circumstances, so her best guess was the Triwizard Tournament. Maybe they were discussing their odds of survival. Hermione really hated that cursed spectacle. As if Harry did not already have enough to worry about. Or – in direct correlation – Hermione herself.

And now they were grooming each other. The Fluffballs, that is, not Harry and Viktor. While the latter would most assuredly have been the end of Hermione's highly valued sanity, even the sight of the former managed at first to startle her at least to some degree. After a moment's pause, though, she deemed it all good and decent. There was nothing inappropriate about it at all, really. In fact, she found their mutual need for hygiene quite commendable and thought it a fitting representation of herself and, as a matter of fact, Harry as well. His general cleanliness was one of the numerous things she really appreciated about him without ever being fully aware of it. He just had a way of always smelling very pleasant. Even after an exhausting match of Quidditch, when he should be all messy and sweaty, he still managed to be anything but unpleasing to her nose somehow, which just had to be a sign of good hygiene if there ever was one.

Admittedly, and although the diligence applied to the task indubitably deserved recognition, Hermione did not harbor any desire to lick Harry's ears quite like that. Certainly not like that! That would have been more than a little odd and absolutely inappropriate in any everyday situation even remotely conceivable. But nevertheless, this was only their way of taking care of one another and any mammals that had not inflicted on themselves the blissful burden of civilization did this kind of thing all the time. If Ron's ginger Fluffballs had not been so excessively phlegmatic, they probably would have done the same for each other, too. Which would have been somewhat ironic given that Ron, as Harry had once told her, could hardly even brush his teeth without complaining about such needless necessities.

At some point, Hermione had to try very hard to ignore the specifics of which areas of their bodies they were actually busy cleaning, though she could not entirely avoid being a little relieved that at least each of them took care of their own parts. These were exactly the kind of things one's mind elegantly omitted when faced with the oh so exciting prospect of working with rodents that would adopt some of one's own characteristics, because these were the kind of things that made that little detail just a tad uncomfortable. Hermione insouciantly chose not to take it too personally. Hygiene was hygiene. All was well.

Thereafter, however, the two miscreants seemed to get into a more playful mood, rolling around Hermione's hands and cavorting about without a care in the world. Their human observer tried her very best to care as little as them about it all, trying to convince herself that this was merely their substitute for animated discussions or quiet togetherness in front of the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, or joyful sessions of playing board and card games, or maybe the occasional silly pillow fight, but no matter how hard she tried, in the end it was simply impossible to ignore that these were two undeniably frisky rodents, one's fur black and one's fur brown, that might as well have been called Harry and Hermione for all intents and purposes, and the cognizance of that little fact did possess a mildly unsettling quality by now.

It took her quite a while, too, to realize that she had become so absorbed by the goings-on in her hands that she had lost all awareness of her surroundings. When that realization finally hit her, she actually gave a little start with a simultaneous intake of breath. Nervously glancing over her shoulder to make sure that Ron was not seeing any of this, she found him snoring away alongside his two Fluffballs that were nestled snugly into his trademark Weasley sweater, and for once she was glad that Ron was being, well, Ron. Her relief lasted for the whole merry second it took her to turn back to the contents of her hands and the events unfolding therein.

With immediate effect her eyes went wide with abject horror as her breath caught in her chest, and she felt the warmth spread on her face with alarming speed and feverish intensity, almost fully negating the wintry weather that had been chilling her unceasingly up to now. Seemingly against her will her eyes shot up to seek Harry, and hoping desperately that he would not be able to read her face from across the distance she instantly averted her eyes once more as soon as they were met by his in a moment of most unfortunate simultaneity of events.

The dubious situation in her hands remained unchanged, or – if anything – got even worse. This was most certainly not appropriate. This was the diametrical opposite of appropriate – inappropriate, most likely. No, this was absurd! And more than anything, it was utterly unacceptable!

Hermione swiftly, furtively checked her surroundings, her eyes darting hither and thither in search for any signs of unbidden attention. Finding none amongst the sedated crowd, she sprang to her feet and made a beeline for Hagrid, walking as quickly as possible without risking to appear quite as frantic as she felt. She had closed her cupped hands as much as she could without squashing their living and all too lively contents, though, just to be safe.

"Hagrid," she said as soon as she was standing right behind him, "I'm afraid these two Fluffballs here are suffering from a slight malfunction."

"Hurh? A malfunction, yeh say?" The half-giant turned around with the maneuverability of a compact van and looked down at her readily presented hands.

"What are they doing?" she urged him already, the pitch of her voice slightly higher than she would have liked.

He hesitated for a moment as he assessed the Fluffball situation unfolding before his eyes. "Well, erm, I'm sure yeh got some fancier way o' puttin' it, but I usually just call it humpin', pardon my French."

"Humping?"

"Er, it means they're—"

"I know bloody well what it means!" Hermione hissed under her breath. "But why would they be doing _that?"_

Hagrid looked a bit lost. "Well, it's, erm, just the way they reproduce I s'pose."

"I'm aware of its biological objective, Hagrid," she informed him impatiently. "I'm asking why— _why_ are they doing this now?"

"Buh—because, erm… well, they… er." He broke off and looked at her quite helplessly. "Don't yeh think yeh could actually explain this better than me, 'mione? I'm sure yeh know how it all works."

"I had the birds and the bees talk a couple of years ago, yes," she replied, "and I'm proud to say my parents proved to be quick learners. But that is beside the point here. This behavior is completely inappropriate! They—they can't do this sort of thing!"

"I wouldn't take it too personally if I were you," Hagrid tried to calm her, but then his brow crinkled. "Wait, are both these Fluffballs yers?" he worriedly asked. "Because that would prolly be a little troublin', I gotta say. They don't look like it, though."

Hermione frowned at him. "Are you saying I should be relieved then, since I'm at the very least not witnessing my own rodent-self copulating with my other rodent-self in what would be an event of psychosexual implications so disturbing that even Sigmund sodding Freud would call it weird? Truly, it's a wonderful Monday morning after all." She paused in irritation, her disbelieving gaze once more absently fixed on the contents of her hands. "Ruddy flipping whatsoever! Could you at least give me something to put these into? I'd really like to start feeling a little less awkward right about now."

"Right, er…" Hagrid hastily looked from left to right and finally grabbed an empty pot from a window sill of his hut, and as eager as Hermione was to get rid of the spectacle in her hands she nevertheless managed to put the two busy things into it with surprising care, then heaved a considerable sigh of relief once they were safely stowed away. Not that they seemed to care very much about any of it.

"So, yeh want t'get some new ones?" Hagrid asked her, almost convincingly casual.

"Oh, I think I've had enough Fluffball fun to last me for a lifetime or two, thank you very much," Hermione more or less politely refused. "And what I'll take away from this class today is a most valuable lesson in the indispensability of selective amnesia."

Hagrid abashedly looked down at his hands that he had folded in front of his considerable belly. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "Thought 'em little buggers would be sort o' amusing."

"I know, Hagrid, I know," Hermione was quick to reassure him, her demeanor softening. "It's not your fault. Although… in hindsight, creatures with this kind of ability in the hands of pubescent—actually, let's not get into that. At any rate, I would honestly prefer something less _amusing_ and more life-threatening for our next lesson. Maybe it's time to go for one of those creatures you've been holding back for so long. I truly think you're ready, you know? I'm definitely ready. And taking a look around, I think everybody else is ready as well."

Hagrid followed suit and ventured a tentative sweep over his scattered class, trying to assess which of his students were merely mildly unenthused and in the process of dozing off and which ones were actually fast asleep already. Then he looked back at Hermione with uncertainty written all over his features, or what little of those was visible between his scrubby beard and his equally tousled mane of hair. "Yeh… yeh really think so?"

"Absolutely," she reaffirmed in earnest. "Just please don't go for the chimera right away, okay?"

The face he made at her was his only response to her well-meaning jape. As if he could possibly ever have gotten such a ludicrous idea into his head! Eventually Hermione's gaze strayed off of him and her smile faded from her features, and Hagrid quickly realized she was sulkily eyeing the not so empty flower pot he had put aside.

She chewed on her bottom lip a little, at strife with herself. "Are they—are they still doing it?"

Slightly uncomfortable, Hagrid slowly leaned to the side and peeked into the pot in question. Then he straightened himself again, just as slowly, and avoiding Hermione's expectant gaze held his eyes directed at some indistinct point in the distance.

"Aye."

"That's it!" she declared in resignation. "I'm out of here – and I am _done_ with Fluffballs!"

Leaving a somewhat disconcerted Hagrid behind, Hermione turned on the spot and waltzed off. Her return to the tree stump happened to coincide with Harry's, and as much as she was lost in her own tumultuous thoughts of furious anger and infuriating confusion and whatever else it was, she momentarily forgot most about it when she noticed his concerned expression, his eyes downcast and his jaws tightly clenched.

"What's going on?" she worriedly asked as soon as they met, and in the distance her eyes briefly caught sight of Viktor's diminishing figure as he ascended the path winding its way up the hillside.

Harry looked up at her as if woken from a restless slumber, his eyes evasive. "Nothing. Just—" He trailed off as he suddenly noticed a certain absence. "Hey, what happened to our Fluffballs?"

"Oh, uh," a flustered Hermione began talking before her brain had assembled a coherent reply, which consequently prompted her brain to berate itself. "Nothing—nothing happened. They basically did the same things they did before, just to each other. With each other. I mean alongside one another. They really didn't do anything, like I said, so the where and the how obviously are redundant variables, since the what is actually nil."

Harry's eyes told an articulate tale of incomprehension. "Uuuh-kay," was its audible finale. "So where are they?"

She stared at him with a blank expression as the seconds passed in silence. "Hm?" she then distantly made, her eyes refocusing just in time to see him furl his eyebrows in response.

"Oh," she exhaled in belated understanding, "I just brought them back to Hagrid. There's only so much nothing you can study, after all, and I figured we learned everything there was to learn. About nothing. Which, surprisingly, was not so much. But anyway, what did Viktor want?"

"Nothing, really," Harry immediately replied. "He, uh, well, uh, it's, uh—"

"I'm sorry," she kindly stopped his stammering short. "I didn't mean to pry. It's really none of my business."

"I wouldn't exact—"

He abruptly broke off when Ron suddenly snored so loud it woke up the startled Fluffballs on his chest, then moaned something that dubiously enough sounded like, "Thank you, Fleur," and then jolted up into a sitting position with the two helpless rodents dropping into his lap with pitiful squeaks of protest. Finding both his friends looking down at him with their eyebrows raised, his round eyes darted back and forth between them in disorientation laced with a pinch of panic.

"And what were you so vividly dreaming about, good sir?" Hermione asked him skeptically.

"Nothing!" Ron instantly ejected as his traitorous ears turned redder even than his hair.

And despite a knowing look being exchanged between Harry and her, Hermione found that she could very well live with _nothing_ , for _nothing_ officially was exactly what had transpired all morning long, be it in the innocent dreams of Ronald Weasley, the inconsequential conversations of Harry Potter and Viktor Krum or in the entirely undisturbed order that was the life of Hermione Granger. _Nothing_ was perfect.

~•~

One of the funnier and lesser known facts about the Forbidden Forest was that the forbidden part in truth only referred to very specific areas of it and that declaring it altogether forbidden was merely a thing of authoritarian convenience, since explaining to children that they are allowed to do parts of something while other parts of the very same thing are off limits to them can oftentimes be a concept of questionable pedagogical effectiveness. And although the allure of the forbidden fruit is a principle not easily dismissed, since the fruit in this specific instance happened to be filled with venomous giant spiders, bloodthirsty vampire bats and purportedly savage centaurs, the interest in daring a bite was generally sparsely dispersed among the students.

And so, while many of the deeper parts of the forest did in fact pose a serious danger – and not seldom multiple variants thereof – to all those who valued their lives at least to some degree, nearer to the edge it was in truth hardly discernible from a perfectly mundane forest at all. More than any other area within its sprawling expanse, Hagrid's personal tree nursery was as peaceful as any cluster of plants could ever hope to be, and probably safer even than some parts of Hogwarts' convoluted interior, as Harry and his friends could personally attest to more than anybody else their age. In addition, the peculiar rate at which the trees tended to grow there was the only patently magical thing about it. In fact, it was otherwise so strikingly ordinary that it was very easy to completely forget that one was, technically, still in the Forbidden Forest.

As for Harry, he was, after a night bereft of all sleep, in such a particular state of mind that bleak Saturday morning that it would have made little difference to him whether he was sitting on an old fallen trunk in Hagrid's tree nursery or in the middle of a spider mother's cavernous and cobwebbed lair surrounded by its many-eyed and eminently voracious brood. The latter at least would have had an undeniable upside, too – that upside being its foreseeable conclusion. Also, unlike Hagrid, the spiders would maybe not have looked at him with so eager an expectation in their eyes. Actually, they probably would have, albeit for very different reasons and in a distinctly different way. And with a lot more eyes. Why was he thinking about spiders, again?

Bound by a vague sense of duty Harry let his tired eyes roam once more over the selection of conifers in front of him, each of them with a long and neatly planted row of their kind behind them and most of them twice and thrice the size of Hagrid himself, the lot of them dwarfed solely by the even larger, mostly naturally grown and far older trees that surrounded them.

"I don't know," he finally said on an elongated exhalation carried by indecision. "They are all… trees."

"Well, er, yes," Hagrid agreed perplexedly. "They're all different, though, aye? The ones on the far left are Fraser firs and the ones next t'them are Nordmann firs. These right here are Norway spruces and those are some kind o' pines. And the ones in the middle, erm… they're called somethin' too, I'm sure."

"Yeah, well," Harry impassively replied, "they still look all the same to me. Mostly."

Hagrid furrowed his mighty brow and looked back and forth between Harry and the trees in question a couple of times. "But… but they're all different. Their shapes are all different, yeh see? They all grow in their own way. See how some of 'em have needles that are a very lush green while others are more of a bluish silvery sort o' color, and others again are very dark? Yeh could touch'em, too." He grabbed a handful of branches as gently as his half-gigantic hands allowed, as if he thought it necessary to demonstrate that it was indeed possible to touch them. "Some are hard and pointy while others are soft and bendy. All… different… trees. Eh?"

Harry watched him with his eyes at half-mast and lazily blinked a few times. "But what if I just don't care about trees anymore?"

Hagrid's expression, having just reached more excited and optimistic levels again during his impromptu presentation, once more fell into one of puzzlement. "That, erm, would be a little irresponsible, don't yeh think? Trees are very important, yeh know? With that photosyphilis of theirs. And nice, too. Real nice, them trees."

"I'm sure they are," Harry impatiently allowed. "But what if I already found the tree I was looking for?"

Hagrid gave a satisfied nod, his eyes sweeping once over the trees behind him, and then looked back at Harry with a contented smile almost lost amidst his bushy beard. "So which one is it?"

For one small moment, Harry seemed almost as confused as Hagrid had a couple of seconds earlier. "I'm not talking about any of those trees," he then explained with a dismissive wave of his hand, and when he saw Hagrid's smile drop once more he hastily added, "It's not your trees' fault, okay? I'm sure they are fine—very fine trees. It's just… well, I know of a tree that makes all other trees look like shrubs in comparison."

Hagrid considered that for a moment, his features creased with genuine effort of thought. "So… where is it?"

Harry glumly shook his head, staring vacantly at the ground. "I'm afraid it's very, very far away. It's always been right there in front of me, and in a way it still is, yet at the same time… it's utterly out of reach. Like a mirage or something."

"Of a… of a tree," Hagrid obtusely muttered.

Harry picked up a dead branch and scrutinized it for a moment as if it held the long sought answers to the profoundest of questions hidden deeply inside its gnarled shape. "Did you ever find that kind of tree?" he eventually queried, never taking his eyes off of the allegedly revelatory branch. "The kind that makes you forget about all other trees… that basically becomes _the_ tree? The tree to eclipse all of its kind?"

Hagrid looked like an oversized first year kid faced with a N.E.W.T. exam. "I, er, don't think I've ever been quite that fond of any one p'ticular tree, t'be honest."

"Consider yourself lucky then," Harry told him with wisdom beyond his years. "Because it sucks."

"Oh," said Hagrid, and it was hard to tell – especially for himself – whether he was genuinely affected, positively surprised or merely utterly flummoxed by that vaguely disheartening conclusion. "So what happened?" he chose to ask after a moment of confusedly trying to fathom whether he was confused – and if yes, how much. "T'the tree, I mean."

Harry heaved a significant sigh. "I'm afraid I may have neglected to water it properly over an extended period of time," he woefully confessed, his shoulders slumped under the weight of regret. "Maybe I sprinkled it a little now and then, but that might actually have done more harm than good, because it was never enough. Never as much as it should've been."

He made a contemplative pause. "I didn't even consciously realize that it needed any water, or – for that matter – that I actually wanted very much to be the one who gets to do all the watering. Or most of it, anyway. And then, to make matters even worse, someone who really knows how to handle his watering can entered the stage, and it got all confusing and I didn't want him to water my tree, but I didn't know what to do about it. And then, when I finally seemed to have figured it out, and when I felt as ready to make use of my own watering can as I thought I ever would, I made an utter mess of things and basically doused, showered and drowned my tree in a bloody flipping deluge."

Hagrid, by now dangerously close to developing a serious psychosis, blinked with his eyelids completely out of sync. "How big is that watering can of yers?"

"It's not about the size of the can, Hagrid," Harry loudly lamented, "but about my total ineptitude in handling it!" He ejected a groan of frustration. "I'm just not used to it. I've never watered a tree before, and I usually prefer to keep my water to myself, you know? It's not easy for me. I mean, I never really learned how to share it with anyone. The Dursleys sure as hell didn't show me. But with that one tree… I simply couldn't help myself. I just had to try. But never having handled a watering can before, it naturally had to come out all at once."

Harry angrily discarded the branch, disappointingly enough having found no kind of revelation in it after all. He looked up at his massive friend, his first real connection to the magical world he had found – or rather, that had found him on a desolate rock somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. "What have I done, Hagrid?"

The half-giant uncomfortably shifted his substantial weight from side to side. "I really don't have the foggiest, t'tell yer the truth," he answered, his demeanor as ashamed as his statement was sincere.

"Yeah, me neither," Harry dejectedly concurred, in no way contributing favorably to Hagrid's mental health. He leapt off the moss-covered tree trunk and onto his feet, then halfheartedly brushed off whatever unfashionable woodland residue may have stuck to the back of his pants. "Maybe it's not even about my questionable watering technique, though," he said. "Maybe it's just my water, you know? Maybe it's just not the right kind for this particular tree. Not the one it wants or needs. Not enough minerals or something."

Hagrid gave a vague, inconclusive nod, nervously groping one poor twig of the pine tree closest to him, which may have served as a last, desperately clutched connection to the constituents of reality.

"D'you think it's okay to water your neighbor's tree once in a while?" Harry asked him musingly. "I mean, when it's technically not really your own tree, but you still take care of it to some extent. That's okay, right? Trees shouldn't even belong to anyone, really, so the tree can still be very important to me even when it's in someone else's garden. The tree would like that too, right?"

Hagrid did not even have the presence of mind to nod anymore, whereof Harry remained perfectly unperturbed. "Because I really, really need that tree in my life," he continued. "If I have ruined even that, I don't know what'll be left for me to do. And I just hate how so often in life you seem to have to lose something first in order to understand what it truly meant to you. What kind of stupidity is that?"

Hagrid's eyes probed the air for help. "Are… are we still talking 'bout trees, Harry?"

The boy heaved a sigh to define all sighs, the sorrow it breathed into the world so profound it almost made winter's crisp cold air reconsider its unforgiving disposition. "Were we ever truly, Hagrid?"

Hagrid did not know what to say to that.

~•~

Eventually, and despite the fact that the appraisal of the finer qualities of trees was not exactly at the forefront of his cerebral capacities that day, Harry had managed to help his most voluminous of friends with the selection of six huge and exquisitely grown conifers that were designated to be part of the special decoration of the Great Hall for the _big night_ , that in its thematic entirety naturally was a well-guarded secret that Hagrid was under no circumstances allowed to talk about. Which is why Harry only learned about half of it from the hopelessly loquacious groundskeeper. Considering that he had originally come to Hagrid in search of refuge from the agonizingly omnipresent hormonal hullabaloo the castle was so infected with, it had been much to his chagrin that he found the half-giant just as astir with Yule-related excitement as all of his younger peers were. All but one, of course. Not the one.

So not only had Hagrid requested Harry's assistance in his tree evaluation – a task that, as it had been bestowed upon him by no other than Dumbledore himself, was of paramount importance as a matter of course – but he had also been perfectly incapable of hiding his anticipation and simultaneous anxiety at the prospect of getting to take Beauxbaton's headmistress Madam Olympe Maxime for a sure to be nimble-footed spin on the dance floor. Harry had been miffed, for sure, but he had endured, and masking his frustration to the best of his ability he had nodded and reassured his friend whenever he had deemed it pertinent.

Once the selected trees had been marked, however, Harry had politely declined an invitation for tea and taken his leave instead. He did not blame Hagrid, of course, but he simply found himself unable to take any more nervously elated chitchat about that fatefully looming day that he wished so very hard would never come. Unwilling to surrender after one mere setback, he refused to retreat back to the castle, and not even winter's chilling winds could convince him otherwise. If only Hogwarts had contained some secret sort of room that would meet his every requirement…

Alas, no such thing was known to him, and so he opted for a stroll on the deserted lakeshore, seeking out the company of the only person left in his world that was neither obsessed with the Yule Ball nor the one who was occupying every last one of his unspoken thoughts. He was agreeably taciturn, very sympathetic towards his current quandary and only minimally clingy. And so Harry and himself went their way along the shore of the strikingly grey Black Lake, their shoulders hunched and their regrettably ungloved hands buried deep within the pockets of their jackets, of which they both just so happened to be wearing exactly the same one. After a while, however, Harry forgot all about his uncommunicative company and found himself alone once more.

And though even underneath his black woolen cap his ears were filled with the rushing of the gales, the blustery rustling of the trees nearby and the rippling of the waves on pebbly ground, his thoughts remained unmuted. And though the harsh wind was blowing furiously across the wide and open surface of the lake and lashing out at Harry unremittingly, he did not relent. And though he was freezing and his face was beginning to ache from the unceasing onslaught of the biting cold, he still walked on, until he came across an outstandingly large boulder that rested there inertly among its smaller kind, just in reach of the shallow water and speckled with dripping icicles on its wetly glistening underside. Coming to a halt in front of it, he hesitated for a moment, then climbed on top of it and sat down with his feet dangling loosely in the air above the low waves.

Only there in this new position did he suddenly become aware of the weighty thing in the left inside pocket of his jacket, which was not quite as thick as he would have liked under these circumstances – the result of a one-look-out-the-window kind of meteorological misjudgment. He unzipped it as much as necessary and retrieved the rectangular object, quick to close the jacket up once more to shield his chest from the intrusive cold. He was, as it turned out, not alone at all. Now in his hands and with him all along were all the companions one could possibly need in bleak and somber times such as these. How could he have forgotten?

The thing was, of course, an immensely powerful 1980s Muggle artifact called, in common parlance, a Walkman. Harry had once snatched this trusted companion on many an escape from the Dursley abode from one of the innumerable boxes in the attic back at Privet Drive, which were filled to the brim with the accumulated possessions of his cousin Dudley that the very same had eventually neglected in favor of newer and more expensive or differently colored things. The device was barely five years old and still fully functional, since Dudley had preferred a different one that was, in direct consequence, broken to the point of being irreparable. By now the Prince of House Dursley was naturally using a portable music player that was utilizing compact discs, because cassette tapes were officially antiquated and their usage a shortcut to being expelled from his highly exclusive clique – the unsung avant-garde of contemporary British culture, really.

Once set, with the in-ear headphones in place beneath his cap, and having quickly checked if the tape was fully rewound, all it took was one press of a button with a triangular rune engraved on it for the magic to happen. Muggle artifacts were simple like that. And so, after a couple of seconds of faint and indiscernible noise, suddenly the sound of a simple kind of melody began, played gently on a single acoustic guitar. Laughter inadvertently escaped Harry's shivering chest, for he had genuinely forgotten that this was the first song on the tape, and even before his lonesome chuckle had fully subsided, already a voice began to sing, _'A winter's day, in a deep and dark December…'_

Minutes later a different voice intoned, _'Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,'_ and the music went on in that kind of uplifting emotional spectrum for the whole forty-five minutes that the length of the tape supplied before reaching its end. The closing song was a haunting piano piece that a certain someone had once recommended to him. Harry could not quite remember what it was called, but he was pretty sure that it was not the Sunshine Sonata. It made him think of an ocean colored like a thousand shades of chocolate, circling a pool of unfathomable black. Somehow that did not help.

With the unruly expanse of the lake and the overcast sky above drearily dominating the view in front of him, it did all seem stylistically cohesive, if nothing else, though Harry could not entirely avoid feeling latently melodramatic about it all as well. And yet his heart was aching, and if there ever was an excuse to be unabashedly sentimental, surely it had to be this. It was quite cathartic, too. Or so he had originally presumed. In the end he did not feel deeply cleansed quite as much as he simply felt frozen to the bones, and so he decided against flipping the tape for an additional forty-five minutes of musically accentuated misery and hopped off the boulder instead, gloomily looking up to the spires of the castle that crowned the cliffs above. To him, in that moment, it represented only the cursed inevitability of things unwanted and encounters shunned.

By the time he crossed the main bridge over half an hour later, the light of day was already beginning to fade, and only then did Harry realize how long he had actually been away. Oh, how time just seems to fly whenever one is busy either dreading the future or yearning for the past. Or enjoying the present, for that matter. Maybe time in general is just going by a little quicker than our clocks would have us believe.

He walked through the entrance hall with his mind set on crossing the inner courtyard so as to avoid coming anywhere near the library. It was silly, he knew, but he did hope to somehow reach his dorm room without running into anyone he was really not at all keen to meet. Which frankly included just about every single human being in the world on that day, but he was willing to make concessions to reality. All but one, truthfully.

"Whoa," Ron intercepted him halfway through the courtyard, stepping over from a small group of fellow Gryffindors. "Where have you been all day?"

"Out," Harry answered brusquely, not even slowing in his stride. Ron, as it turned out, was not really part of those concessions he had had in mind. He had been thinking more of the sort of people that would refrain from talking to him. In an act of contrition, however, he stopped, turned around and trying to rectify his rebuffing attitude added more conversationally, "Just out and about."

Ron scrutinized him skeptically for a moment. "In this kind of weather?"

Harry in turn furrowed his brow as he pointedly glanced about. "You're outside, too."

"This doesn't count," Ron casually waved him off. "It's an outside inside an inside. An interior exterior, some might call it. And there's hardly any wind here, either. Also, you're the one looking like a human popsicle while I'm my usual dashing self. Like my bobble? It's pretty dapper."

Harry absently eyed the aforementioned bobble on top of Ron's fuzzy hat, even as the latter already had his mind elsewhere. "Hey, why are your shoes and trousers wet?"

Harry looked down at his damp appendages, then back up to find a red-nosed redhead looking back at him askance. "Seriously," Ron said, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, "what have you been up to?"

"I just needed to get some fresh air."

"In a pond?"

Harry let out an irritated kind of breath, not quite sigh and not quite groan. And then he winced, because Ron suddenly yelled out, "Hey!" Gathered around a wooden table underneath an Everspring tree, which was a magical kind of tree that stubbornly refused to accept any season besides spring all year long, Neville, Dean and Seamus turned around and looked over to them. "I'm gonna have to take care of our chosen one right here and save him from hyperventilation."

Three slightly befuddled faces stared back at him.

"Hypothermia," Harry mumbled.

"Whatever!" Ron shouted, at which three pairs of shoulders were shrugged.

Ron amicably put a hand on Harry's back. "Come on," he said as he walked him to the door ahead of them, "let's get you into some dry clothes or a hot bath or something." Harry raised an eyebrow at him. "What? I didn't say I'd join you. Unless you ask me really, really nicely, of course."

Once inside, they walked onward through the corridor in silence for a while, said while lasting for about half a dozen steps – the very limit of what Ron's so called patience could take when it came to his best friend's worrisome behavioral shifts.

"It's about last night, innit?" he asked, not exactly circumspect. "That mysterious Astronomy Tower business of yours." Harry did not answer, which frankly was answer enough. "You finally made your move, didn't you? Not the worst setup, I'll give you that. So a Ravenclaw girl, eh?"

"It wasn't a setup," Harry irritably insisted, his temper flaring up. "It wasn't like that. I was being honest for a change. Ingenuous, even. And it didn't work out quite the way I would've hoped, so—"

"Yeah, I figured as much."

"Really?" Harry asked in mock surprise. "What gave it away?"

"The fact that you make squishy sounds with every step, among other things."

Up until now that minor detail had somehow managed to completely escape Harry's attention. "Perfect," he concisely assessed. "Bloody perfect. I sound exactly like I feel: pathetic."

"Merlin, what happened on that tower?"

"The last thing I want to talk about."

"Oh, so you _do_ want to talk about it!" Ron exclaimed facetiously. "We'll just have to talk about everything else first."

Harry made a tortured kind of sound, almost like a pitiful whimper.

"I'm sorry, mate," said Ron, his apology sincere. "I was just trying to lighten the mood a little."

"I know," Harry assured him ruefully. "It's just not the time. I don't think I even have a mood right now."

Ron remained silent for another handful of steps. "I mean, you can still ask somebody else though, right?"

"I don't _want_ to ask anybody else, okay?"

"Oh," Ron exhaled, and then again, with sadness rather than surprise, "Oh. I… I had no idea there was someone you genuinely liked."

"That makes two of us," Harry murmured under his breath.

"Man, that sucks," Ron summed it up quite aptly. "Me, I basically have a crush on anything with a nice pair o' baps on it these days."

At that Harry snorted, and there may have been half a chuckle hiding in it.

"See, there's a little mood," a grinning Ron said, rather pleased with himself. "I'll be honest with you," he then continued, "I was beginning to warm up to the idea of simply skipping the whole thing. Sure, my parents would be disappointed that I don't get to wear that moth-eaten relic of a dress robe that's been handed down in our family for about half a geological era, but I don't see why I should torture myself for an opportunity to make a fool of myself. I can do that every day, right? Without the pain of talking to girls and all that dancing rubbish. So, 'No ball for me,' I was thinking. It's not mandatory, after all."

"Yeah, speak for yourself on that one," Harry bitterly remarked, falling a step behind as he angrily swatted at his soggy pant leg that insisted on sticking to his skin.

"I know, I know," Ron was quick to proceed. "And that's exactly why I just changed my mind, you know? So listen up."

Suddenly, Harry felt something grabbing hold of his jacket and pulling him away. So utterly startled was he by the first, fierce tug that he did not even have the time to properly consider resisting. There was a swirl of long hair and he stumbled in its wake. A door swung open, then quietly closed behind him, and already he found himself shrouded in utter darkness as he felt something odd between his teeth and on the tip of his tongue.

Out in the corridor, a clueless Ron went on, "We're in this together, you hear me? I got your back, mate, and I know you got mine. So tomorrow we'll go over our remaining options and then we'll strike – boom! They won't even know what hit them. In a manner of speaking. In a suave sort of way, I mean. We're not actually hitting anyone, right? But you and I, we're brothers in arms. Wingmen, as the expression goes. Divided we fall, together we don't care when we do. That sort of thing. Because we're best mates and we look out for each other, right? What d'you think? Do we got this, or what?"

Silence. Only now that he had stopped talking did he notice the conspicuous absence of any squishy sounds next to him. "Well, what do you think, Harry?" he asked again just as he stopped and turned around. "Harr—huh?"

Before him, the hallway yawned emptily in the flickering light of the sconces, devoid of any human presence but his own. The only sound to be heard was the sigh that escaped his deflating lungs.

"I feel so unloved sometimes."

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Sigmund Freud:_ It's not just Freud, it's FREUD!

 _Friends:_ The utterly useless footnote above was a reference to the sitcom _Friends._ I should apologize for making fun of the man twice now, but... well, I suppose that's what you get for projecting your own Oedipus complex on the entirety of mankind. In all seriousness, though, his contributions to and influence on 20th century thinking are undeniable. Next time you visit a modern art exhibition, remember that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

 _Photosyphilis:_ Don't try this at home, kids.

 _The tree of all trees:_ The original tree to eclipse and predominate all of its kind was, oddly enough, not a tree but a woman. Namely one Irene Adler in the singular mind of Sherlock Holmes. Within Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original works, she makes her only appearance in _A Scandal in Bohemia_ , published in 1891.

 _Walkman:_ I didn't even make this one up, folks. It really existed, tape salad and all. The generic term being cassette player, the Walkman is actually a specific brand from Sony, first marketed in 1979 in Japan. It reached the international markets under diverse and seemingly disconnected names such as Soundabout, Freestyle and Stowaway, before Walkman eventually became all but synonymous with portable cassette players. At least in Germany, anyway.

 _Music:_ The three songs specifically referred to are _I Am a Rock_ by Simon and Garfunkel, _Yesterday_ by The Beatles, and the Piano Sonata No. 14, also known as the _Moonlight Sonata_ , by Ludwig van Beethoven. Wait... didn't I already allude to _I Am a Rock_ in a previous story of mine? Damn, next time I'm going with _Sound of Silence._


	7. Attraction

**• Chapter VII •**

 **Attraction**

"Ow!" a voice hissed in the dark. "Did you just bite my hair?"

"Well, excuse me, lady, but you pretty much slapped me right across the face with it," a second voice replied defensively, a little lower in its pitch than the first one. "What's going on, anyway? I can't see a damn thing in here."

"You know, I was just about to attend to that when you decided to bite my hair."

"I didn't bite your hair," the other voice insisted. "Your hair just got caught between my teeth."

"That's basically a euphemism for biting." The only response to that was a disembodied sigh that wafted through the air. "Be that as it may… where is that stupid lamp?"

"I'd reckon it should be somewhere above our—ow!" There was a short-lived drumming sound of what may have been a light piece of wood meeting stone. "Damn it, you almost got my eye!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," the decidedly feminine voice hastily apologized. "I thought I was turned the other way. Wait, where are you, exactly?"

"I haven't even moved," answered the other one. "I'm right here. Hello? Here's my hand."

A pause. "My left breast is delighted to make your hand's acquaintance," the first voice tonelessly imparted.

"Whoa, sorry!" A hand invisibly darted back to the body it belonged to as if it had been burned by something hot.

"D'you have your wand with you?"

"No."

"You _don't_ have your wand with you?"

"No? Uh, yes? I mean, I don't."

"You were outside for hours, weren't you?"

"Yes?"

"Without your wand," the voice flatly stated in blatant disbelief. "And people wonder why I worry so much about you. Unbelievable."

An unintelligible mumble was heard, most likely more admission than defense.

"Ew, there's something wet here," it came a bit squeakily from somewhere nearer to the ground.

An uncomfortable silence hung in the lightless room for a moment. "Uhm, I'm afraid that would be me."

"What?"

"My shoes and my trousers got a little wet."

"How?"

"Water does that sometimes."

 _Tut-tut_ it sounded through the dark. "Don't get flippant with me now, mister. You're still my hostage."

"Your control of the situation is truly impressive, too. What are you doing down there, again?"

"I'm looking for my wand that your ill-placed face made me drop," was the answer. "Although I suppose what I'm doing actually consists less of looking and more of blindly groping about."

"Be a bit more careful what you grope for, will you?"

"Says the boy who grabs a girl's chest as soon as he thinks nobody's looking."

"Well, technically, nobody _was_ looking. Wait, that's not what I should be replying to that…"

"Got it!" A rustling sort of noise followed. "Okay, let's see. Literally, I hope."

A couple of seconds later there was a dull metallic clank, and then indeed – faint and flickering at first, but quickly brightening – there now was candlelight cast onto them from just above their heads, and Harry found Hermione standing right in front of him, reaching up with her left hand to stabilize an old lantern that dangled from an iron hook in the low ceiling. In her other hand she held her wand. Its sparkling tip was touching the tarnished bronze frame of the lamp while the flame inside was making the warped shadows of the case dance bouncily around the little room.

The room itself, as the slightly muffled sound of their voices and the lack of any perceivable echo had already suggested, turned out to be not very roomy at all and was in actuality more of a stuffy, potentially claustrophobic broom closet. There were crooked wooden shelves reaching from floor to ceiling on all three doorless walls, cluttered with a variety of cleaning supplies, janitorial equipment and other utensils both arcane and ordinary. Leaning against the shelves was also a selection of brooms, of course, though not of the flying kind. The remaining floor space amidst all these disregarded odds and ends – themselves ironically enough in much need of a thorough dusting by all appearance – could hardly amount to two square meters. While Hagrid would not even have fit through the door, Harry naturally felt right at home.

The most striking difference to his cupboard kingdom of old back in Privet Drive was the fact that back there he had never had any company at all, which was just about the best thing one could possibly have to say about his preposterous childhood accommodations. And indeed, as Harry now was quickly learning, if there was one thing that could give very tight spaces altogether different dimensions – in a strictly figurative sense – it surely was the presence of another human being. He was furthermore quite aware that this particular case shared very little resemblance with his uncomfortable and equally irritating cupboard interview with Rita Skeeter from the month before.

So when Hermione, her illuminating work done, had tucked away her wand and finally looked at him with a small but affable smile on her lips, Harry felt something squirm in the pit of his stomach as all the events of the past twenty-four hours came rushing back to him, as if somehow the darkness had briefly made them less apparent.

"Hi," he nevertheless managed to say, his own smile – unavoidable at the mere sight of hers – feeling somewhat taut on his features. Possibly because they were still half-frozen.

"Hi yourself," she replied, her smile spreading. "It's nice to see you. Finally."

They wordlessly stared at each other in that manner for about two seconds longer than an avoidance of any awkwardness would have required, and they lowered their gazes in such simultaneity that it was well-nigh impossible to tell which one of them had averted their eyes first.

"So, uh," Harry spoke up as he scratched the back of his neck, "what's going on… in here?"

"I really just wanted to talk to you," Hermione answered a wee bit meekly as she looked down at her folded hands. "Needed to, actually."

For some reason neither of them was very aware of in that moment, both their voices had sounded much more confident when it had been dark around them.

"Well," said Harry, "that's something of a relief at least. For a moment there I thought this might actually be an assassination attempt."

She laughed a little nervously. "Yeah, sorry about the rather drastic measures. But when I saw you out in the hallway I just did the first thing that came to my mind. Which really goes to show why I usually prefer to think matters through before I act, since apparently I do some pretty wacky things whenever I don't."

"Maybe you should try it more often," he suggested jokingly, if not entirely in jest. "I don't think I've ever been in here before, and who knows where we'd end up next time? It's quite adventurous, really."

"Right," Hermione skeptically said. "I mean, what are hidden vaults and secret chambers compared to this grubby old cubbyhole? Maybe next time my unparalleled spontaneity will take us straight into a wheelie bin."

Harry gave a quiet chuckle.

"Honestly, though," she continued more seriously, "I just didn't want to make a scene in front of Ron. And also… further contributing to my unusual impetuousness… was the fact that I've been first looking and then waiting for you… well, frankly, all day long."

"Oh," he said, plainly surprised to hear that. "You—you have?"

She nodded in confirmation, though her eyes were elsewhere idly adrift. "I knew I had to talk to you the moment I woke up, if there even was any sleep to wake from. I just didn't know _how_ at first, so naturally I—"

"Thought things through."

Again she nodded, her eyes fleetingly darting up to meet his. He reciprocated the unsteady smile that briefly flickered over her lips.

"But when I thought I finally had a good enough concept," she concluded, "you had apparently fallen off the face of the earth."

"Yeah," Harry answered, visibly ashamed, "I'm afraid I was kind of trying to get away from… things."

Hermione looked at him with her features lined with sadness then, perfectly aware of his meaning.

"I got your message, though," she informed him seemingly en passant, and almost convincingly so.

"Oh, that," said Harry. "I hope Crookshanks didn't mind too much."

"I'm not sure he was even all that aware, to be honest. He won't give Hedwig a run for her money anytime soon when it comes to the delivery of messages. Or really anything even remotely useful, for that matter." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, d'you want to see it? I filled it in."

Harry was a bit reluctant. "Well, it was really a silly thing to do, I suppose." He abashedly raked a hand through his hair as he watched Hermione procure a folded piece of paper from a pocket of her jeans. "Pretty childish. And awfully impatient. Also, I didn't mean to pressure you or anything. Honestly. I really shouldn't have—"

"And yet I was childish enough to answer it," Hermione gently interrupted his apology, deeming it unnecessary. "Here it is, if you'd like to have a look."

Already she had made a step towards him, which was about half the steps the length of the room allowed in total. Harry reached out with a vestige of hesitancy, and when he grabbed the small piece of paper between two fingers he looked up from their briefly touching hands and found her meeting his gaze. The backward step she made was just a tad too hasty to appear entirely casual.

He cleared his throat and busied himself with unfolding the small white sheet of Muggle paper, feeling almost painfully self-conscious. Finding his silly message written on it in his own scratchy scrawl did not exactly improve his condition, either. _'We are still friends, right?'_ he had so maturely written on top, and underneath he had offered three possible answers with corresponding checkboxes next to them: _Yes_ , _No_ and _Maybe_. New and as such unexpected, however, was a fourth checkbox beneath his original three, which was the one that had been marked. And right next to it, written in a decidedly finer script, it read: _Unalterably_.

He looked up at Hermione, smiling lopsidedly. "Would've been nice to know about this before I got busy moping about out in the cold."

She returned his smile, although faintly – pensively, somehow. "Would it, though?"

He seemed puzzled by the question. "Well, it's… it's nice, isn't it?" She looked at it him so intently that it made him gulp involuntarily. "It—it is, isn't it? Is it not nice? Is it bad? Is that some kind of trick question? Am I—am I missing something?"

He hectically read over it once more in desperate search for anything he might have misunderstood or even missed entirely. There really was not all that much to read, however, and he was left feeling none the wiser and all the more confused.

"Maybe it's just me," Hermione mused aloud, "but it gave me quite the headache, to be honest."

His head darted back up. "A headache?"

She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly as she absently fiddled with the top button of the white shirt she wore underneath a thin red sweater, which Harry had a rather hard time ignoring as much as he thought he should. "I'm just not so sure about that particular word, you know?"

Again he looked at the piece of paper in his hand, staring at the word she had written there and begging it implicitly to reveal to him its hidden meaning.

"Unalterably," he slowly muttered, feeling very much like the embodiment of the exact opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Or any other smart person, for that matter.

"Hm," Hermione quietly made, and it sounded quite meaningful as far as _Hms_ go. As she pensively eyed the piece of paper in Harry's hand, she spoke up again. "It's just that… to alter is to change, right? So, when something's unalterable, it literally means it cannot be changed. It's immune to alteration."

Harry's attentive if somewhat addled gaze slowly drifted from her back to the suspect word beneath his silly message. It _did_ look a little different to him all of a sudden, though the exact manner in which it accomplished to do so remained markedly nebulous.

"Huh," he voiced his inconclusive observation quite candidly.

"I know change is something that many people tend to be a bit wary of," Hermione went forth to elucidate her thoughts, "at least when they're somewhat content. Sometimes even when they're not. But regardless of what one might subjectively think of it, change remains a constant. It happens with every passing second, whether we want it to or not, and even when we stubbornly refuse to accept it. It's what makes time a perceivable everyday phenomenon in the first place. It's what makes life itself happen. Fighting change is like tilting at windmills."

"Barmy?"

"Futile."

"Oh."

"Change is not that big bad monster we sometimes make it out to be," she continued. "Granted, it can be a daunting thing to face and there's never a guarantee which way it will go, yet face it we must. And it can be a good thing, too. A quality, a fortune, a blessing in disguise. Because, you see, things that don't bend tend to break. Things that don't grow wither. And things that don't change may eventually find themselves obsolete. They won't evolve and they'll never get anywhere where they have not yet been. And then, sooner or later, they'll simply cease to be altogether."

The silence that ensued eventually made Harry come to the conclusion that this was probably an appropriate moment for an expression of general agreement. "Right," he therefore said with an accompanying nod.

Hermione watched him silently and with unblinking attention for a moment longer. "You don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"What?" he asked indignantly. "Of course I do! You're _clearly_ talking about… about change and—and growth and… natural… selection?"

She discreetly cleared her throat with a hand at her lips, tucking a loose strand of her rebellious hair behind her ear as she hid a little smile in the corner of her mouth. "I was trying to say something about our friendship, actually."

Harry's eyes wandered in a semicircle from one side to the other. "And I," he said as he gave a very slow nod, "was perfectly aware of that."

By now Hermione was trying her best to contain a thorough fit of giggles that wanted so very much to be released. She composed herself with an intake of breath, stale though the air around them was.

"I was hoping to delineate why exactly I'm not too fond of that word I wrote in regard to us," she set out to clarify. "To put it less circuitously: I don't particularly like to think of our friendship as something _unalterable_ , something fixed and static. I'm not even sure it can be put into any single word. Maybe… _irreversible_ would've been a better choice. Or just something nice and simple, like _always_. At any rate, I do prefer to see our friend—our relationship as something very capable of change and growth. In fact, I'd argue that it hasn't done anything less ever since we first met. Wouldn't you agree?"

Harry blinked twice or thrice while he wondered a bit woozily whether Hermione was still standing the full two steps away from him that the severely limited space allowed for, and only then realized that his verbal input was expected. "Yes," he then hastily concurred. "Yes, I would. I mean, I do. I actively and currently do… agree."

The way she slowly – and seemingly unconsciously – ran her fingertips up and down the side of her neck had quite a hypnotizing quality about it. Also, there was definitely more space between Hermione and the door behind her than between her and Harry. There really was not much space left between them at all. One might even have gone so far as to call it an outright alarming lack of space.

"The conclusion may suggest itself, then," she musingly offered, "that it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to expect it to continue doing so. To continue changing… and growing… and evolving."

"Yes, that's very suggestive," Harry spluttered in response. "O—of itself, I mean. It's self-suggestive, basically." He gulped, and his Adam's apple felt like a Golden Snitch in his throat. "I'm confuseled."

The smallest of smiles ever so subtly curled up the corners of her rose-colored lips, this time without any attempt of concealing it on her part. "It's nice of you to finally catch up with me."

There was no more denying that Hermione was by now standing right in front of him, the tips of their shoes hardly a foot's length away from touching. And more importantly, almost the same could be said about their faces – which, at the very least, gave him ample opportunity to study hers more closely for a moment. Had it been this warm all along in there, or did this particular broom closet have underfloor heating, by any chance? And where exactly did that strange tingling sensation come from?

"You don't look very confused to me right now," Harry eventually concluded his facial examination.

"Our roles appear to have been reversed then," Hermione replied, "because last night I could've said the same about you, while I, in the meantime, was more confused, more fundamentally disoriented, more hopelessly uncomprehending than I had ever been before in my entire, admittedly not yet very long life."

"I thought… I thought you were just not—"

"No, Harry," she interrupted his train of thought, her voice soft and yet emphatic. "I was not _just not_. I was the very opposite of _just not_. I was everything but _just not_."

Harry found himself additionally startled for a moment by the very physical presence of Hermione's hands as he suddenly felt them resting lightly against his chest. "So—so you were…"

"Overwhelmed," she told him, and looking at her own hands she seemed to blush ever so slightly, their current placement apparently no less surprising to her than it was to him. She did, however, not retract them. "Utterly and completely overwhelmed," she instead went on to say. "And I'm sorry for that – sorry for being so excruciatingly unable to handle the situation in one of the myriad ways that would've been better than what I did, which was basically… nothing. I am deeply, profoundly sorry for whatever pain I may have caused you, although I have to admit that I'm still just as flummoxed to find that I'm even capable of hurting you in this particular way."

"Is it really that difficult to believe?"

"In spite of the accumulating evidence, yes. It still boggles my mind."

"Surely it would take more to accomplish that extraordinary feat than… well, whatever it is about this that's giving you so much trouble."

"Harry, yesterday was the single most nonsensical day of my life," she let him know. "I mean it."

"You're exaggerating."

"No, I'm not."

He gave her a dubious look, an eyebrow arched with unmitigated skepticism. "You're a scientifically-minded, Muggle-born witch that at the age of eleven suddenly got a wax-sealed letter delivered by an owl to inform you about your innate magical abilities and offer you the opportunity to develop those at a secret school in the middle of nowhere whose official hymn includes the words _Hoggy Warty Hogwarts_."

Hermione inhaled as if to protest, then by all appearance discarded the idea. "That's… probably not the worst point ever made," she conceded with some reluctance. "But still, I stand by what I said. This is larger than unexpected invitations to seven years of wand-swishing, and infinitely more perplexing. I'm still trying to remove the impossible so that whatever I'm left with, however improbable, may be the truth, because it all seems equally impossible to me."

The look he gave her spoke plainly of his persisting lack of convincement.

"Consider this for a moment," she set forth to explain. "Yesterday, December 16th, 1994 – and yes, there's already a corresponding and awfully muddled entry in my diary – an uncommonly interesting and very likeable young man openly expressed his affection for me for the first time in my life. With or without the inclusion of David Copperfield, that alone already caused bewilderment enough, even though it probably didn't come as a complete surprise at that point anymore. Not even for ever-skeptical me. And the young man was, in fact, so nice and so intriguingly different yet strangely familiar that I could even see myself ignoring that exceptionally sociable part of me that finds that whole Yule Ball business genuinely vacuous. I could actually envision myself doing something out of character, if he should ask me to."

Harry dropped his head at that, trying to hide his face from her as he knew all too well of whom she was speaking. Yet barely a second passed before he felt the tender touch of two fingertips beneath his chin, gently guiding his head back up until his eyes were caught in the glistening intensity of her arresting gaze.

"Little did I know, however," she told him in a whisper, "that a mere eight hours later the most important person in my life would do the same, and therewith turn my whole little world upside down."

For a moment he was so captivated, so completely taken in by the caressing sound of her voice and the wondrous meaning of the words she spoke that he could neither think nor speak. When he attempted the latter – mostly foregoing the former – he realized that the Snitch in his throat from earlier had apparently turned into a Quaffle.

"Sounds like quite the inconsiderate bastard, if you ask me," he managed to quip after an initial difficulty with finding his voice, a nervous hitch therein the unavoidable remainder of the effort.

The whiff of a chuckle quietly escaped her nose. "Well, if you knew him the way I do, you'd love him too." There was suddenly a mortified look in her eyes and she quickly averted them at that, abashedly busying herself with fiddling around with the zipper of his jacket. "Or—or like him, rather. Just generally like him. Very much, though. Nonspecific feelings of affection are… are what I'm talking about here. Obviously."

Even as Harry was still watching her with one half amusement and one half wonder mingling on his features, a shamefaced Hermione shook her head with her eyes held tightly shut. "Anyway," she tried to collect herself. "You… you had me in a complete mental freeze up on that tower. I could not assemble a single coherent line of thought. The things you told me were unbelievable to me, and at times it was as if I were listening to my own most guarded wishes, spoken in your actual voice. I had fooled myself into believing that I had finally, safely put away all these stirring emotions that had been troubling me for so long now. After that moment in the library I was so sure that this would never come to be, and I made up my mind to come to terms with it once and for all. To push away any remnant of hope which my naïve heart was so desperately clinging to. That you could ever see me this way. But then last night happened, and I felt like I was caught in some impossible dream. And I don't necessarily mean that in that cheesy sort of way. Or maybe I do, actually. I don't even know. Nor do I care."

With her eyes restlessly flitting across her hands that still lay right there over the hastened billows of his lungs, she weakly heaved a sigh, her breath all fluttery. "What I'm trying to say… what I'm trying to say is..."

"If you're saying what I think you're saying—"

"I am," she immediately assured him, her eyes darting up to seek his. Then she wrinkled her brow in sudden rumination. "At least I think I am. It depends on what you're thinking, of course, but I hope that what I think you're thinking is what you hope I'm saying. Which I definitely am."

Harry squinted his eyes in concentration, mildly overstated and yet essentially sincere. "Could this by any chance mean that we don't have to be so confused anymore, then?"

"It doesn't quite sound like it, does it?" Hermione answered, and they shared a bout of subdued and blissfully nervous laughter at that. "Then again, I believe being in a prolonged state of latent confusion isn't all that bad in this particular instance, as long as we're confused together."

"Sounds good to me," Harry opined with a crooked smile, and jokingly added, "I think."

Her lips mimicked his at that, and with their smiles fading pleasantly a silence came upon them for a while. Hermione absently ran her fingertips along the seams of the front pocket on Harry's jacket that was almost right above his heart, and he was too mesmerized to be cognizant of anything but the gauzy assurance of their coinciding existence.

"You know," she then began almost a bit coyly, "as far as I'm concerned, there's really – mostly – just one small thing that's still giving me a little trouble. A minuscule sort of detail, really."

"Yeah?" Harry was just present enough to ask. "What's that?"

"Well, I cannot help but wonder whether last night on the Astronomy Tower you were merely informing me of your original inclination to ask me to the dance, or if perchance you were still actively intending to do so."

Harry looked mystified. "I thought that much at least was clear enough."

"Not quite," she softly said. "There was an awful lot of past tense involved, if I remember correctly."

"Oh," said he, then thoughtfully remained quiet for a moment. "I, uh… I wouldn't wish to ask you to do something out of character, though."

Hermione looked him straight in the eye at that. "But that's just the difference, isn't it?" she said, her voice barely more than a wisp of breath. "With you it wouldn't be."

In Harry's mind there suddenly flared up the scarily enticing idea of simply kissing her right then and there, of wrapping his arms around her and closing that damnable rest of distance left between them, and for one tempestuous second the sweeping imagery with all its wild temptations made his frenzied heart forget its rhythm. He wondered deeply what it would be like and what would happen and how it all would feel, but the subjunctive is not the realm of history, and he was fourteen years of age and not named Clark Gable.

"Well," he said in defiance of his fervid inner cinema, just barely able to avoid choking on his own voice, "in that unexpectedly convenient case, I'll have you know that I was still _actively_ trying to communicate my intention to do... that thing."

Hermione bit her lower lip, which unbeknownst to her did not at all help Harry in holding onto what little speck of his mental order was still left to him. "There's that pesky little past tense again…" she sheepishly mumbled.

"Uuuh," Harry droned inanely, then gave his useless head a jolt. "It's, uh–a very present thing, too. Very… present. No DeLorean needed."

"Hm," she vaguely made. "I do wonder what that would sound like, you know? That thing you presently want to do."

Harry had to give his inner Clark Gable a decisive push at that. The guy was being awfully obtrusive.

"I, uh," he haltingly began, then already chose to start from scratch. "Well, I suppose it would—it would sound like… no." He shook his head. That did not work, either. "Actually," he began a third time, "what it _does_ sound like… is this." He took a deep breath of unadulterated courage. "Hermione Jane Granger," and she looked at him with a shimmer in her eyes, "would you—"

"Yes!" she blurted out, and in consequence looked even more startled than Harry was.

"I thought you wanted to hear this?" he asked her, amusement breaking through his initial perplexity.

"I'm sorry!" she apologized desperately, her cheeks radiantly ablush. "I—I couldn't help it! I'm too bloody nervous and excited and…"

What she could not possibly know, meanwhile, was that she unintentionally – and therefore most authentically – was being so irresistibly endearing that Harry was in the process of coming dangerously close to finally, hopelessly surrendering to the haunting influence of Clark Gable. His dashing, annoyingly manly ghost may as well have been actually hovering there right next to them, like Peeves or Nearly Headless Nick, unambiguously waggling his eyebrows at Harry with a sparkling smile on his translucent face, urging him to let caution be gone with the wind.

And then it happened. There was just enough time for an uncomfortable shiver to run down both their spines in unknown simultaneity and for their eyes to widen in horror at the sound of the weakly creaking doorknob, and just as the door was forcefully yanked open they both gave a violent start. Hermione swirled around on the spot and once again whipped her long curls of hair right across Harry's face, who submitted to it with almost graceful acceptance and merely pursed his lips – with just about half a strand of hair again caught right between them. He spat it out.

"And what delightful little thing do we have here?" the most naturally loving voice of Hogwarts rhetorically asked in its familiar, life-affirming drawl. "Gryffindor's most illustrious specimens of adolescent infatuation, caught in the act. How utterly typical."

"It's not what it looks like, Professor!" Hermione instantly sputtered, hastily straightening her perfectly tidy clothes in direct and woefully unnecessary contradiction to her assertion.

"Unless it looks like two people standing in a closet," Harry complemented. "Then it's exactly what it looks like."

Hermione's eyes fluttered shut and her lungs inflated dramatically while he spoke. "Silly boy," she then said with a nervously lilting laugh, giving Harry a subtle shove with her hip. "This is hardly the time for ontological discourse."

"Who said anything about birds?" Harry wondered aloud.

"What it _does_ look like," Snape interposed sharply, "is first and foremost a due reduction of points for poor Gryffindor."

Hermione looked shocked. "On what grounds?"

Snape coldly scrutinized them for a moment, his face a mask of indifference with the exception of his eyes that spoke of naught but unconcealed contempt. "Disgustingly pubescent behavior," he then declared icily, "habitually arrogant disregard for order and decency, as well as…"

One of the old and battered brooms behind Harry and Hermione toppled over as if by magic, and three pairs of eyes followed its fateful acquiescence to gravity. Its sturdy handle was heavy enough to cause a single loud thud on its eventual impact on the stone floor, its echo resonating in the hallway like a gavel's strike.

"… vandalism."

"But—" Hermione meant to protest.

"Minus ten points," Snape gruffly cut her off, brooking no dissent. "Each."

Two inarguably pubescent teenagers – disgusting or not – stared back at him in consternated disbelief.

"Unless you are waiting for me to double the penalty," the Head of House Slytherin told them threateningly, "I advise you to get out of my sight – _at once."_

Clenching their fists and biting their tongues, Harry and Hermione stepped out of the closet, neither of them deigning to look at their Potions Professor.

"Potter," Snape brusquely made him stop at his shoulder after Hermione had already passed him by. "Would this by any chance belong to you?"

Limply levitating in mid-air at the tip of Snape's wand, Harry was not all that happy to see a familiar black cap. His right hand slowly went up to his regrettably uncovered hair quite of its own accord.

"Thought so," Snape pointedly remarked, and the cap suddenly shot ahead and promptly hit Harry's chest, then slumped down into his readily opened hand.

"Five more points from Gryffindor," Snape informed him with a nearly imperceptible hint of relish in his voice. Harry looked back up at him, his features hard under an angrily furrowed brow. "For littering," Snape enunciated, challenging Harry with his abyssal eyes alone to dare and say _anything_.

Clenching his jaw so hard that his mandible and his maxilla came astoundingly close to switching places, Harry stomped past his secondary nemesis and quickly caught up with Hermione, who had turned around after a few unsuspecting steps to look for him.

"You know," she eventually tried to make some conversation when they had walked side by side in a strained kind of silence for a while, her voice subdued as if Snape might still be lurking somewhere nearby to jump at the first chance to retract even more points from his favorite house of Hogwarts, "apart from that almost disastrously snarky slip in the beginning you really handled yourself well back there. Very impressive self-control."

Between Severus Snape and Clark Gable, the former was the lesser presence on Harry's mind as he ambiguously mumbled in answer, "You have no idea."

And for once in her life Hermione Granger truly did not.

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Tilting at windmills:_ Famous Spanish pastime, popularized through the novel _El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha,_ by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615.

 _Elementary:_ Another reference to Sherlock Holmes is made, when Hermione quotes his words about the art of deduction as uttered in _The Sign of the Four,_ published in 1890.

 _DeLorean:_ Harry makes a reference to the 1985 movie _Back to the Future,_ which indubitably will at some point be remade in expectably awful a fashion. Now, you may ask why Harry would mention a DeLorean when he himself has used a Time-Turner. Well, who in their right mind would prefer some silly little pocket watch over a time-traveling DeLorean, huh? Never mind that the DMC-12 was actually a bit of a troubled vehicle. But when that baby hits 88mph, you're gonna see some serious shit.

 _Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn:_ Harry finds himself haunted by the ghost of American actor Clark Gable, who portrays Rhett Butler in Victor Fleming's 1939 film _Gone with the Wind,_ itself an adaptation of the 1936 novel of the same name, written by Margaret Mitchell. Both are extremely obscure works of fiction, however, so I thought I'd mention them here to get the word out.

 _Field entanglement:_ Harry confuses ontology with ornithology, which to be fair happens all the time. While the former concerns itself with the rather prosaic question, "What is existence?" the latter truly challenges the human mind by asking, "What bird is that?"


	8. Propulsion

**• Chapter VIII •**

 **Propulsion**

 **Sunday**

Ronald Weasley was fairly content. As it nowadays was his cherished custom on Sundays, he had risen from bed no earlier than ten o'clock and was now – a mere twenty minutes later – recklessly slumped into the cushions of the chesterfield in the common room with his long arms lazily stretched out over the backrest, neither sitting quite orderly nor fully recumbent. And exactly as such it was a very important transitional step in his morning routine, from the horizontal life to the tiresomely vertical one. Since weekdays at Hogwarts deprived him of that essential need with that silly schedule of theirs, this transitional phase was on those days unavoidably moved to the first two or three classes, unless said classes were conducted under the strict eyes of either Professor McGonagall or Snape, both of whom displayed an unfortunate lack of sympathy for his finely tuned, gradual waking procedure.

The remainders of his breakfast – besides the clean-picked tableware none to speak of, naturally – were stretched out on the low table in front of him. As a matter of course he had maintained long-established Weasley connections to the kitchens and a more recent personal agreement with Dobby and his fellow house-elves made sure that his special Sunday breakfast was served at this exact spot with dependable punctuality every week, with his own punctuality being subject to a liberal degree of fluctuation, incidentally. Hermione frowned upon his _presumptuous exploitation_ of the ever-sequacious elves, of course, but since frowning appeared to be one of her favorite pastimes as it was, Ron chose not to concern himself too much with the matter.

No, life was far too pleasant for that sort of thing. Never mind that today marked the day exactly one week away from that bothersome Yule Ball business and that he was still set to once again be the cause of general familial disappointment at the Burrow. Never mind that his best mate had been acting most oddly for the past couple of days and never more so than the night before, and – more importantly – that he appeared to be taking little interest in Ron's own little crisis. Never mind all that. That was most definitely not what Sunday mornings were meant for.

He was just enjoying a pleasant sort of rumbling in his tummy at the enticing thought of some sweet pudding that might nicely round off his breakfast when he saw Harry entering the common room through the portrait hole.

"Good morning, mate," his friend greeted him breezily. "Nice to see you've rejoined the waking life."

Ron languidly stared at him with his eyes halfway back to retreating from aforementioned waking life. "The heck's up with you now?"

Harry looked nonplussed. "What d'you mean?"

"You seem to be changing moods by the hour," Ron told him a tad peevishly. "Yesterday you supposedly didn't even have one and now you can't stop smiling like an idiot by the looks of it."

"That's nonsense," Harry casually dismissed the insinuation, smiling. "It's just—just a beautiful day outside, don't you agree?"

Ron lamely turned his head as much as necessary to throw a sidelong glance at the nearest window and the overcast, rainy tristesse beyond. He could almost feel the brisk and chilling winds assaulting the tower's old stone walls. He turned back to Harry. "The heck you talking about?"

Harry seemed to be at the cusp of saying something, but just then his eyes darted away from Ron and focused on something else that apparently made him forget all about it. Ron switched to auxiliary energy and turned his head over his shoulder.

"Hey there," said Hermione, and her eyes did not even so much as flicker into Ron's general direction. He was irritated to discover that she too was smiling like an idiot.

"Morning to you too," Ron tonelessly said to her, which finally and quite abruptly caught her attention.

"Oh, hi!" she all but shouted back at him. "Hi, Ron! Nice to see you there… at the scene of… your willful exploitation… of the debatable subservience of house-elves…" Her expression had gradually turned sour, the sight of which frankly made Ron feel a bit relieved. At least she looked her normal self again.

"Did you sleep well?" Harry asked Hermione. "Did you have breakfast yet?"

"Yes and yes," she replied, her disapproving scowl instantaneously yielding to a reappearing smile. "We must've missed each other in the Great Hall. I was up a bit early today. Felt a bit too fidgety when I woke up."

"Why?" Ron interposed lethargically. She gave him a look as if she had just noticed him sitting there for the first time. Again.

"Hm?" she numbly made.

He just stared at her impassively for a moment, then turned back to Harry. "Listen up, mate," he said, for once this morning speaking with some enthusiasm. "I got some great news, for a change. See, I found out that Parvati and her sister don't have dates for the ball yet, surprisingly enough. They're pretty fit, right? You should totally ask them… I mean, we should ask the two of them together to go with us, eh? It's pretty damn perfect, don't you think?"

Harry failed to look even half as enthused as Ron had thought he would. In fact, he looked rather peaky all of a sudden.

"Oh," he exhaled, his eyes again briefly flitting elsewhere. "Right, uh… that." He ran a hand through his raven hair, somehow managing to leave a trail of disarray amidst what already was general disarray. "About that… I, uh, I'm afraid I'm kind of… sort of… spoken for… already."

Ron blinked. "Huh—how? How's that even possible?" There was a trace of panic mixed into his incredulity. "Just a couple hours ago you were Mr. Melancholy with the aching heart and the wet pants! You made squishy sounds!" He turned to Hermione, who was looking at her feet for some reason. "How long was I asleep? What day is it?"

"I'm sorry, Ron," Harry spoke up again. "I was just in too much of a daze last night to think of telling you about it. I could barely believe it myself, what with how it happened all so fast, so suddenly, so unexpectedly... honestly, I was essentially abducted!"

Ron could've sworn he heard a faint, subdued snicker from somewhere behind him, but he was far too befuddled by what was going on in front of him to pay much mind to what was transpiring outside of his field of vision.

"Who is it, then?" he asked.

"A… girl?" Harry smoothly equivocated.

Again Ron just stared at his friend as the seconds ticked on by.

"It's the Astronomy Tower person," Harry was accommodating enough to add, yet Ron furrowed his brow in response to that.

"I thought that whole episode was a complete disaster that broke your heart in two?"

Harry averted his eyes and shuffled his feet on the rug he was standing on in front of the fireplace, mumbling something unintelligible under his breath.

There came a weak coughing sound from behind Ron. "Maybe just a slight misunderstanding after all," Hermione opined in a small voice. "From what I've heard Harry overwhelmed the girl quite a bit with that heart of his."

"But only because she isn't just another girl to me," Harry quietly uttered, his eyes kept firmly on the ground.

Ron disgustedly shook his head at this early morning sentimental fuss. "How come you know about this, anyway?" he asked Hermione, even making the effort to once more turn around and look at her. She seemed to have taken a particular interest in the patterns of an embroidered pillow she had picked up from the couch.

"Harry told me about it, of course."

"Aren't the two of you just seeing each other for the first time today?"

"Obviously he told me last night then."

"But Harry said he was too dizzy to talk about it."

"To you," she replied more snippily than intended, immediately rueful in consequence. "I—I mean it's just generally easier to talk about this kind of thing with a girl, you know?"

Ron's probing eyes went up towards the ceiling. "Why?"

"Buh—because of... feminine… sensibilities?"

Ron's eyes kept probing, first left then right. Then he shrugged, turned halfway back towards Harry but stopped and instead looked suspiciously at Hermione again. "Why's your face so flushed?"

Luckily Hermione's cheeks could not possibly get much redder than they already were. "Is nobody else feeling the heat in here?" she asked, hastily touching her cheeks and her forehead with the back of her hand. "Is it just me? I am feeling a bit feverish, to be frank. Maybe I'd better see Madam Pomfrey about it. Might be coming down with something."

"Well, if you're lucky it could last just long enough so that you can use it as an excuse for skipping the ball," Ron told her, "'cause if things go on like this the two of us will be the only ones from our year without a blasted date."

"Actually," Hermione hesitantly began, "I, uh, kind of… sort of… have one of those."

Again Ron's forehead crinkled. "One of what?"

Hermione studiously avoided looking at him. "A date," she meekly said. "For the… for the ball."

His lower jaw dropped half an inch, his lips forming words that never came to be. "What? You too? Are you serious?"

She faintly nodded her head.

"How's that even possible?" an agitated Ron went forth to lament, his voice thin and hoarse as it was wont to get these days whenever he tried to raise it above an average conversational level.

"Thanks, Ron," Hermione replied with a factitious smile. "I know it's well-nigh inconceivable."

"That's not what I meant," he amended in passing, turning to Harry in a dash of desperation. "Just yesterday the three of us were all in the same boat and now over night you've suddenly kicked me out in the middle of the bloody sea without even having the decency to throw me my floaties!"

There passed a long, uncomfortable silence between the three of them. Harry and Hermione were shamefaced, Ron just completely at a loss. "I don't even… this is just…" he aimlessly stammered without getting anywhere, then broke off and abruptly turned back to Hermione. "Who's your Romeo?"

Hermione gave an indistinct shrug, some strange miniature smile curling up her lips that Ron could not even begin to properly define. "Just some bloke I met in a broom closet."

Ron's eyes widened to circles. "Bloody hell, what is the world coming to?!" he exclaimed, his voice barely holding together for two consecutive syllables. "Who are you people and what've you done to my socially awkward friends?" His head swirled around once more. "Did you know about this?"

Harry looked like a deer caught in the headlight. "Nuh-no? Of course not! Why would I?"

Ron gave his clueless friend a very stern, deeply concerned look. "Well, don't you have anything to say about this?"

Harry chuckled uneasily. "You sound like her concerned father."

"Someone better had, apparently," Ron gave back, pointedly crossing his arms in front of his inflating chest. "This is hardly appropriate behavior for a girl her age."

There was a half-contained snort of laughter behind him.

"Ron, please," Harry appealed to what he hoped would be his friend's best approximation of reason. "Do you honestly believe Hermione would let herself be dragged into a closet against her will by some git she doesn't even like only to then consent to accompany him to a dance?"

Ron just wordlessly goggled at him for a moment, his unblinking eyes still wide with fundamental bewilderment. There may have been just the slightest touch of insanity in a spasm at one of his lower eyelids. "Well, there's just no way of telling anymore, is there? What with me being the only sane person left 'round here."

He would never know, but Hermione by now was ducking – collapsing, truthfully – behind the backrest of the couch with a pillow pressed tightly into her face to preemptively smother any potential fit of laughter that may have threatened to overcome her, of which there momentarily were quite a lot.

At the sight of her desperate retreat Harry himself struggled with a goofy kind of laugh that traitorously escaped his mouth. He quickly stifled it when Ron perked a critical eyebrow at him.

"Let's just calm down a bit, shall we?" he offered, adjusting his demeanor to better suit the undeniably serious dimensions of the situation. "It's gonna be fine, Ron. We'll find you a date and then the three of us will all go to that ball and then wonder together what we're even doing there since not one of us is particularly keen on the idea of dancing in the limelight. You'll meet Hermione's closet boy and my astronomy girl and we'll all be the best of friends. It's gonna be great, you'll see."

Ronald Weasley looked neither reassured nor markedly convinced.

Ronald Weasley was not content at all.

~•~

 **Monday**

Despite the numerous and not seldom all but insurmountable differences between the worlds of Muggles and magical folk, there surely is to be found at least an equal number of things that are very much the same on both sides of the great divide. Less so the most fundamental truths of human nature that permeate every transient culture ever erected on top of them, and more so the universal constant of paperwork.

Minerva McGonagall's personal opinion on the matter was very much contingent on the exact nature of any papers finding their way onto the meticulously organized desk in her personal study. Being a teacher, and having been an academic virtually her entire life, paperwork was in some form or another not only an unavoidable part of her everyday affairs, but an integral one as well. Grading exams, planning her classes, going through her notes and keeping up with occasionally questionable changes being made to the curriculum by the Department of Education were the daily routine of her professional life: pleasant enough for the most part, interspersed with the sporadic highlight of the sparkling brilliance of the youthful mind, and only in the rarest of cases able to make her seriously question the legitimacy of the reputed sapience of _Homo sapiens_.

These days, however, her paperwork consisted to no small degree of matters entirely unrelated to the education of Britain's wizarding future. Indeed, instead of the betterment of tomorrow it was the preservation of a less enlightened yesterday that required her constant and grudging attention. While ever since its first announcement the Triwizard Tournament itself had churned in her troublesome feelings of condemnation and anxiety, in more practical terms it mostly meant well-nigh endless heaps of paperwork. Policies demanded to be perused, contracts were in need of thorough reviewing, various forms required signatures, schedules had to be organized and security protocols asked for approval. And in this particular case her opinion was firmly set: the only paper pertaining to the tournament she dearly wished to sign was that of its immediate and irrevocable cancellation.

And then there was the Yule Ball, of course. While regrettably a byproduct of that Triwizard tribulation this year, and undeniably stressful from a strictly organizational viewpoint, it nevertheless spoke to decidedly different parts of Minerva McGonagall's sensibilities. Not that it did not come with its own share of problems, as a sweeping look over the list of confirmed attendees in front of her made all too clear. Of the four champions, whose presence at the event was naturally mandatory, one still remained without a dance partner. For one odd moment she genuinely wondered whether the boy had truly begun to think that the mannequin he had been practicing with was a suitable candidate for the night itself. A knock on the door put a welcome end to the absurdness.

"Yes?" she answered.

The door opened tentatively, and no more than a wild mane of hair and a sweet face amidst it appeared in the gap. "Excuse me, Professor McGonagall," Hermione Granger politely spoke, "but I was hoping you'd have a moment."

"Certainly," the Head of House Gryffindor assured her. "Please do come in."

Her favorite student, who could not actually be her favorite student because she could not possibly allow herself to have one of those, for that would have been highly unprofessional, took a seat in front of her desk, her whole demeanor unusually timid.

"What can I do for you?" the professor chose to encourage her secretly favorite student, who in turn looked up from her hands but remained hesitant for a second longer.

"Well," the young witch finally opened up, "I suppose this is one of the less foreseeable matters for me to seek you out about. I'm sure it'll come as quite a surprise to you, but I... I was wondering if maybe you would be willing to help me out with some, uh... dancing... related... issues."

Professor McGonagall's arched eyebrows indeed spoke of surprise at that, yet her tongue got no opportunity to follow suit as already Hermione rushed into a nervous elaboration of her own. "You see, to my great dismay I ultimately – and only after increasingly desperate efforts to the contrary – have arrived at the reluctant concession that dancing may just be one of those things one simply cannot hope to learn from reading a book alone. Even when it's richly illustrated."

The professor struggled to keep her lips in a straight line as she listened. "I can see where that may have given you trouble," she told the smartest girl she had ever tried to teach anything the girl did not already know. "Dare I assume that after all your name may be added to the list of the attendees of the ball, then?"

Hermione eyed the conspicuous piece of paper underneath the professor's folded hands with some apprehension. "While I do reserve my right to run away screaming should I not be able to get the hang of this in time," she said, "I'm afraid... yes. As it stands, I'm indeed set to attend. Confusingly enough."

"I must say I'm rather pleased to hear this, Miss Granger," Professor McGonagall told her in earnest. "I have little doubt it'll prove to be a good thing for you."

"It can be a surprisingly thin line between a good thing and a complete and utter disaster," Hermione replied only half in jest.

McGonagall smiled. "I will gladly help you in whatever way I may to keep it safely on the good side of the line, then. So, what can I do for you? Is it the good old waltz that has your legs in a knot?"

"Not quite. My dad actually made a game of teaching me some common dances a while back and I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll manage fairly well in that department." She paused as she bit her lower lip. "But, uhm, it's come to my attention that the traditional introductory ceremony of the evening is very much a thing of its own, and due to the fact that this time there are going to be four instead of the usual three pairs it's not even the same as it used to be. Which — regrettably — renders my book on the subject even more useless than it already was to begin with."

"Oh," the professor flimsily exhaled, a bit befuddled. Seemingly of their own accord her eyes wandered down onto the list on her desk and that one markedly free spot next to the name of one of the four champions right at the top of it. Realization set in, resulting in a warranted change of emphasis. " _Oh!_ Then you are–this means you must be..."

Hermione averted her face and looked down at her fidgety hands once more. "Uh-huh," she sheepishly mumbled. "Pretty ridiculous, isn't it?"

Minerva McGonagall quietly studied the woman in the making sitting in the chair in front of her with myriad emotions running through her. "Actually," she said, "the word I was looking for was... marvelous. Quite marvelous, indeed."

Hermione's head snapped back up. "D'you really think so?" And when McGonagall smiled and nodded her head, Hermione's own lips spread into a beaming smile of their own. "I think I think so, too."

And just then the soothing thought entered the professor's mind that out of this whole damnable affair of the Triwizard Tournament something good might after all arise.

~•~

 **Tuesday**

One kind of magic nobody in these parts of the world would ever need to receive an invitation to Hogwarts for in order to fathom its meaning is that of the first snow of winter come anew. Not the first few snowflakes falling vainly from the sky to melt away at Earth's gentlest touch, mind you, but the first day of the waning year when everything the eye can see is covered in a flawless quilt of white. That day that can come time and again with every passing year and yet never quite lose its novelty. That day that softly calls out to people of all ages to indulge in youth eternal and–

"Ronald Weasley, this is _not_ where the carrot was supposed to go!"

The so blatantly accused redhead came around to stand next to Hermione, who had her arms akimbo as she regarded the young Weasley's prominent contribution to their snowman's front side with a most disapproving and slightly disgusted gaze.

"Why not?" Ron blithely asked, looking at their unfinished work's midsection with his head cocked to the side. "Makes him look so much happier."

A chuckle with the distinct tone of Harry's voice coming from behind her made her sternness give way to a reluctant smile. Still she shook her head as she grabbed the carrot. "We're on school premises," she reminded them with overstated severity. The way she waggled the carrot at the two boys did not exactly help them keep their composure. "This is not the kind of happiness anyone should feel comfortable seeing around here. And I will not suffer my snowman to be a pervert."

" _Your_ snowman?" Harry challenged her playfully. "I thought this was supposed to be _our_ snowman, what with the three of us working on it and us boys doing the heavy lifting."

Her face already flushed from the cold, her cheeks may yet have turned a slightly deeper shade of red at that. "That's what I meant, obviously," she meekly mumbled as she turned her back on them to neatly put the carrot in its proper place half a snowman's length higher than before.

"Hey, you want these as arms?"

All three of them swirled around to find a blonde girl neither Harry nor Hermione could quite put a name on staring at them with two long and many-fingered branches in her hands. Crowning her head they beheld a bobble cap showing the most ill-advised color scheme ever conceived by man.

"Oh! Hey, Luna," Ron greeted her amicably, then turned to his friends. "Neighbor of mine, more or less. Friend of Ginny's. Ravenclaw. Third year. I know all kinds of stuff."

"Nice to meet you," said Harry, extending a gloved hand towards her. The girl named Luna put her branches into it. Slightly perplexed, Harry smiled. "Thanks. If only I had thought of bringing my own..."

"So, are you all going to the Yule Ball, then?" Luna asked them as if they had already been in the middle of an ongoing conversation.

Ron's mood visibly dropped with immediate effect. "Well, _they_ are," he muttered with a sideways nod in his friends' general direction.

"Oh, of course," Luna said, looking at Harry. "Is it someone special?"

Harry averted his eyes, the bluntness of the question taking him by surprise. "The most," he mumbled, and next to him Hermione feared she would make the snow melt away underneath her feet.

"Let's put those nice branches to use," she spluttered already and hastily took them from Harry, barely avoiding crashing right into him in her flustered haste. Just as quickly she proceeded to turn her attention back to the snowman.

"I'll help," Harry said and followed suit.

"And what about you, Ronald?" Luna meanwhile addressed the last of the bunch behaving like a mostly normal human being.

He shrugged his shoulders, the very embodiment of nonchalance. "Think I'm just going to skip it. Haven't found anyone I'd really wanna go with, you know? But couldn't care less, really. That whole dancing business? Too girly for me, I figure."

"But it could be so much fun!" Luna recklessly trampled right over his very authentic coolness. "I would totally go if someone would ask me! I have the funniest dress, but I never get to wear it! Oh, and Ginny showed me the dress robe you'd be wearing! It's so great! You'd look so fabulous! You should totally do it!"

Ron stared at her, and he needed a breeze of cold winter air to remind him to blink. "Yeah, uh," he eventually managed to stammer, "perhaps... perhaps I'll do that."

Luna smiled at him and nodded energetically. Ron's head did a vague nodding thing of its own, and then his eyes drifted on to look at some trees and the sky and the castle.

"Your snowman needs buttons," Luna then declared. "I'm going to look for some nice pebbles. I know a spell."

And already she trudged away through almost knee-high snow with three pairs of eyes following her.

"Yeah, don't mind her," Ron told them as he got back to gathering more snowman material off the ground. "She's always been a bit... you know. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but... you know. Just play it cool, same as I." He froze in midmotion when he noticed the way they both stared at him, eyes all round under eyebrows arched. "What? What did I do now?" His clueless gaze went back and forth between the two of them a couple of times, and with every turnaround a little clue was found. "Wait. You're not... you aren't seriously suggesting..." His jaw then dropped, and so did the snow he had held in his hands. "Blimey!" he cried out loud and bolted away to give pursuit to the girl called Luna.

~•~

 **Wednesday**

The ability to fully focus her mind on whatever given thing required her attention, Hermione liked to think in all due modesty, had always been one of her more outstanding traits and indubitably essential to her scholastic achievements. That is, of course, until she completely lost every last trace of this most useful of abilities and instead became a bumbling fool like everybody else her age.

Two times she had already read one and the same passage of the book she wanted very much to internalize and still she could not even recite half of it from memory. In fact, she hardly knew what surely important knowledge this particular chapter was trying to impart to her. And why? Because her allegedly brilliant mind managed to process about two and a half sentences before losing all sense of priority and drifting off to indulge instead in hormonal daydreaming. Even now that she started over for the third time in five minutes her mutinous thoughts kept winding their way back to words she could not believe she had heard, to looks from eyes she had never thought she would receive, back to Astronomy Towers and broom closets and then ahead to the Great Hall set for a dauntingly magical night of dancing.

And by far the worst part of it all was how impossibly buoyant and joyful and excited it made her feel in every tingly fiber of her being, so that in the end she cared so little about the book in her hands that its very existence was all but forgotten. Never before had Hermione Granger not cared about a book. An unsettling observation, for sure, had she only had the presence of mind to make it.

"Interesting book?"

Wincing, Hermione looked up from those funny dark squiggles of ink her eyes had scanned but her brain had long forgone interpreting. She smiled at Viktor, hoping the sudden rush of warmth she felt in her face had the decency of remaining invisible. "It's, uh... highly thought-provoking, if nothing else."

Viktor nodded, then watched her pensively for a moment. "You look different," he observed. "Shiny, somehow."

Hermione curled her eyebrows. "Shiny?" She turned her head towards the window and then back to Viktor. "Because of the sunlight?"

Amused, Viktor shook his head. "No, not like that. Glowy, maybe? The light is coming from you, not from outside. Your cheeks and your eyes. I don't know. Happy, yes. You look happy. And I just meant that it is really easy to see."

"Oh," Hermione stated, confusedly touching her supposedly glowing face with tentative fingertips.

"So it all worked out in the end, yes?"

That got her attention right back, and she looked at him to find him smiling warmly at her. Her own features, however, grew contemplative. "I'm not entirely sure, to be honest," she told him, gingerly closing her book and folding her hands on top of it.

Viktor, promptly concerned, slid down onto the cushioned bench opposite of her. "What do you mean?"

Her whole body language spoke of hesitance as she nibbled on her bottom lip, then heaved a sigh. "I can't help but feel like I've mishandled this whole situation." She watched him look at her attentively, but with little comprehension. So far she could hardly blame him. "I mean... we haven't talked since Saturday, and leaving things as they were without so much as another word doesn't seem right to me. I should've come to you sooner. I meant to. But things got so profoundly confusing within a matter of hours that day that I just... I didn't know–"

"Hermione," Viktor interrupted her, gently, and her uncertain eyes met his. "You have nothing to apologize for."

She exhaled a jittery breath. "But... I would've said yes."

The faintest of smiles flitted over his lips as he looked at her. "But not for the same reason you said yes to Harry."

She looked away, out the window and over landscapes clad in nature's inimitably white gown. "No," she admitted. "But yes nonetheless, and gladly so."

Viktor considered her words for a moment, then voiced his honest conclusion. "I fail to see the problem."

"Well, doesn't it seem unfair to you?" she asked him, uncertainty still reigning over her. "With the way things went... I don't know. Doesn't seem quite right to me, now that I finally take a moment to think about it. Though thinking clearly has been giving me some unexpected trouble these days."

"You did nothing wrong, Hermione," Viktor told her with caring insistence. "I mean it. You did not give me any wrong impressions. You were not unfair or unhonest or anything like that. You are not that kind of person. You did not keep one guy in the oven and the other in the fridge."

Hermione's ruminative gaze wandered up towards the ceiling. "Probably because I'm not a serial killer."

He smiled. "See? Another one of your endearing qualities."

"Still," Hermione stubbornly refused to let the issue be resolved this easily, "why did it have to get so complicated? This really should've been a rather straightforward kind of thing, shouldn't it? Ideally with nobody getting hurt in the process."

"Ah, but not in matters of the heart, yes?" Viktor spoke musingly, unconsciously sage beyond his years. "And so what? Each of us got hurt a little bit now, but surely nobody suffered wounds that will leave any scars. You can't blame yourself for having someone you like and someone you love, Hermione. And if you have to blame someone, blame that boyfriend of yours. The bugger really made things more complicated than they had to be."

She looked up from her hands to find him grinning with eyes and lips alike, then shook her head with a chuckle of her own. Afterwards she busied herself with a wayward strand of her hair, remaining quiet for a moment. "He's not my boyfriend," she finally said, and to her subsequent annoyance she sounded not unlike a stroppy kindergartner.

Viktor, quite fittingly, tilted his head to the side. "Right."

"We haven't even kissed or anything like that."

"Why not?"

"Because we're caught in some kind of limbo between a broom closet and a ballroom," Hermione expounded, flicking that bothersome strand of hair aside. "We're like two people that have agreed to go on a date, only that we just so happen to see each other on every single day leading up to it. Which, I assure you, is quite the inconvenience. On the outside nothing has really changed at all."

"Well," said Viktor, "it is not the outside that counts, is it? And I reckon the kissing will take care of itself soon enough."

Blushing, Hermione averted her face, sheepishly mumbling, "Whatever."

A low chuckle came from Viktor. "I must say you are the cutest thing I have ever seen."

Blushing some more, Hermione mumbled on, "That doesn't really help anyone right now." She shook herself and took a deep breath. "Who are you going to the ball with, anyway?"

His eyes briefly focused on something behind her. "She is over there, actually," he said, inconspicuously pointing over her shoulder. "Céleste Baudelaire."

"Baudelaire, huh?" Hermione turned her head to look, then felt something petty squirm inside of her at the sight of that living effigy of immaculate feminine beauty, flashing dental perfection at two of her disturbingly attractive schoolmates. " _Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l'abîme, O Beauté?_ Though her name suggests the former. Honestly, do they even accept average-looking people at that school?" She turned back to Viktor, albeit with an all too obvious avoidance of eye contact. "At any rate, you're welcome."

He gave her a puzzled look, which on a fleeting upward glance she eventually noticed.

"You just accomplished the rare feat of tripling your score by going from your first choice to your second," she informed him matter-of-factly, appearing almost perfectly unfazed.

Meanwhile, there was some considerable furrowing taking place on Viktor's brow and forehead, and he heaved a long sad sigh before he spoke. "What will it take for you to see your own beauty?"

Taken aback by the question, Hermione needed a second longer to collect herself and retrieve her tried and tested defense mechanism of sarcasm. "A mirror with a rather severe perceptual disorder."

Viktor shook his head with a pinch of amusement and a touch of melancholy in his expression. "What is with the French, anyway? It sounded pretty good to me, although I am probably not the best judge. Do you speak it?"

"My grandfather met my grandmother in 1944," Hermione answered in her very own way. "I can speak a little German, too, _wenn auch nur ein kleines bisschen_. But not because my other grandfather met my other grandmother in 1945."

Viktor laughed out loud, a deep and pleasant sound not often heard. "Honestly, Hermione. You are literally one of a kind."

"Figuratively," her brain instantly made her eject in a flight of compulsion. Mortified, she blushed and apologized immediately, but eventually just joined his continuing and increasingly hearty laughter, though not without hiding her face behind her book, for which at least a use had thus been found.

~•~

 **Thursday**

Meal times in the Great Hall could be rather hectic an affair, though admittedly by itself that was hardly a source of uniqueness next to any other roughly comparable place with schedules of its own to keep. But then, of course, in this specific case meal time also meant mail time, though frankly that was not outlandish enough to make much of a fuss about either. But then, at Hogwarts in particular, mail time also meant owl time, and that is where things got decidedly shambolic.

When sometimes dozens of feathered bringers of letters, pouches and boxes in innumerable colors, shapes and sizes entered the hall through an opening up high under the vaulted ceiling in quick succession, flapping their wings and soaring over ducked heads and tables set for breakfast, lunch or dinner, shedding feathers and sometimes dropping worse, it never quite ceased to make several of the over two-hundred students and even a couple of senior teachers wonder just what kind of nutter had ever come up with this especially delightful idea. Alas, the traditions we cling to...

Add to all that joyous everyday routine the fact that the holidays were now just around the corner and that this year far more students than usual would be spending them at school, the number of owls going in and out the hall seemed virtually unprecedented, and the size of some of the arriving packages raised questions not only about the inexplicable strength and endurance of their avian carriers, but also about the possibility of systemic animal abuse in the wizarding world.

Beside that general concern on Hermione's mind, she still could not quite help but selfishly wish that something smaller and less attention-grabbing than a great gray owl would have delivered her own and very much expected package. In this instance, the daily bedlam around her really worked in her favor for once, as only a handful of fellow Gryffindors looked at her with curious eyebrows perked. Christmas presents from family members for students staying at school for the holidays were not usually delivered this way, since Hogwarts had a separate system for handling that, which involved nocturnal house-elf activity and a general degree of secrecy that would have made Santa Claus turn green with envy.

Still, as soon as the hall began to empty as people freshly fed stood and left to resume their penultimate day of school in the year of 1994, Hermione's curiosity got the better of her, and after removing the brown paper wrapping she gingerly opened the flat rectangular box thereby revealed just enough to have a furtive peek inside. The horror of the following revelation set uncomfortably somewhere in the pit of her stomach.

"Oh no," she exhaled unwittingly. "No, no, no..."

Harry, having watched her every move, had no idea what to make of her reaction, for all he had caught before Hermione closed the box underneath her folded arms by collapsing right on top of it was a glimpse of what he could only assume had been some pink-colored piece of fabric.

"What's wrong, Hermione?" he worriedly asked, inwardly debating whether he should maybe put a hopefully comforting hand on her back.

"My life," came the muffled response from the heap of misery that was Hermione Granger.

Harry looked at her rather helplessly for a moment, scratching his temple a little as people passed them by with amused expressions. He waited until they were out of earshot, then resumed the matter at hand, whatever exactly it was. "Isn't that just your dress for the ball in there?"

"No, Harry," the human manifestation of black despair replied. "That is most definitely _not_ my dress."

He mulled that over in earnest for a second or two. "So, uh... whose dress is it?"

Abruptly she straightened herself up and shoved the box over to him. "Have a look for yourself, if you must," she told him. "I didn't plan for you to see it before... before I was in it... but in light of this most recent of all too familiar disasters I reckon it hardly makes a difference anymore."

He looked at her despondent features, then eyed the box in front of him with a little apprehension of his own. The cautious peek inside proved to be a rather sobering experience. There, indeed, was a neatly folded pink dress, which was as acute an evaluation as his knowledge of fashion enabled him to make. He threw a probing sideways glance at Hermione, who unblinkingly stared at the box as if it literally were that of one Pandora, although in the original myth the box had actually been a jar and not a box, as Hermione likely would have pointed out, which Harry in turn could have countered by reminding her that in the original myth the box that was a jar was also said to hold far greater perils than a pink dress. But it never came to any of that.

"So," Harry instead slowly spoke, treading most carefully, "is this... about... the color?"

"You think?" she exclaimed in mock disbelief. "What gave it away? Surely not the fact that it looks like it's made of bubblegum?"

Harry responsibly took another moment to properly appraise the article. "Admittedly, it _is_ a bit... intense," he allowed, "but I'm sure it could be worse, right?"

"How?" Hermione asked him, her disbelief now sincere. "By being translucent?"

His wayward mind got a bit lost at that on roads better left untraveled while in public spaces and broad daylight.

"Harry?"

"Yeah, uh, can't you just change the color with some of that magic hodgepodge we sometimes do?"

She sighed dejectedly. "There's a reason Madam Malkin doesn't just sell a bunch of grey clothes," she explained what clearly should have been self-explanatory. "Using a charm to change its color would merely serve as a temporary illusion, the quality of which is wildly unpredictable and depends greatly on lighting and angle of incidence and all that kerfuffle. Worse, doing so would also void my right to return or exchange the item. And under no conceivable circumstances do I wish to be stuck with _that._ "

Harry thoughtfully nodded his head. "But the dress is the right one? Just the wrong color?"

"Yes, Harry, but seriously... I am not going to the Yule Ball looking like Princess Peach!"

"Why not?" Harry dared to quip. "I could totally get a fake mustache."

There was a whiff of a chuckle in her sigh, but sadness ultimately took the upper hand. This whole episode really seemed to give her far harder a time than Harry could yet understand, but she preempted any inquiry he was about to make of his own volition.

"It's just so typical, you know?"

"What is?"

"Murphy's law, I guess."

"What's that?"

"More of an adage than an actual law, frankly," Hermione elaborated. "It basically states that anything that _can_ go wrong, _will_ go wrong. And the contents of that box right there are proof of that."

Once again Harry eyed the visually unremarkable box in question. He too was beginning to dislike it just a little bit, if only because it made Hermione so inexplicably sad.

"I really wanted this to work, you know?" she went on to reveal herself to him. "Picking out a dress was a rather difficult undertaking for me, seeing how I found myself feeling utterly ridiculous when picturing myself in any of them. But when I found the one I really liked, I couldn't help myself. I got a bit excited, I must admit. I was really looking forward to trying it on and I... I wanted to make a real effort to look nice for you, so that you wouldn't have to be embarrassed for taking your swotty bookworm of a friend to the dance. And now this happens and that tiny hope goes straight out the window. I sent out the order Sunday night! There's no way I can return this and get the right one with only two days left and all that holiday craze going on. So I'm officially screwed. I'll either have to go as Barbie or not at all, and right now I think I'd really prefer the latter. D'you think you could still get another date at this point? I really wouldn't blame–"

Her tongue got stunned alongside the rest of her body when she suddenly felt the touch of a hand at the side of her face, gently guiding her head back up from wherever her eyes had sought refuge.

"I'm going to make this short, so that the message that really needs to reach you right now doesn't get lost on the way," Harry said to her, retracting his hand but keeping his eyes fully locked with hers. "So, two things. I think. One, it's you I want to take to that stupid ball, not a dress. Not any dress. And just as no dress in the world could ever be my reason for wanting to go with you, not even the ugliest dress in the world could ever make me not want to go with you. Even if it literally were made of bubblegum. Although in that case I couldn't promise I'd be able to resist the temptation of taking a bite or five. And not because I'm addicted to bubblegum.

"Two, since I assume either you or your parents paid for this dress, and more importantly because I want you to feel as comfortable as you possibly can in a situation that is set to be a bit uncomfortable for the both of us, and maybe – just maybe – so that for once in your life you'll feel as beautiful as you are, I must insist that you'll grudgingly let me use my name and play that ludicrous baby hero card of mine to get you the right dress in time for the ball. I'm appropriately embarrassed to say that it's probably going to work."

Hermione stared at him, or perhaps through him. Her lips were slightly parted; not an inch of her body appeared to be even in the faintest state of animation. Not even her chest, which was mildly alarming.

"Hermione?"

She inhaled sharply, her eyes refocusing. "Hnguh?"

Harry pursed his lips and scrutinized her with narrowed eyes, trying to assess at what point exactly he had lost her. "I really tried to make it short."

"Oh, uh-huh, yeah, sure," she blathered away. "Very succinct. Straight to the point. Well done. Ten points for Gryffindor!"

He looked at her askance, and with crimson cheeks she looked anywhere but at him. "Let's go then," he said, deftly hopping off the bench while simultaneously taking Hermione by the hand and grabbing that eldritch box of unspeakable pink-colored horrors.

Being swirled around and then for want of any alternatives stumbling after him she dizzily queried with half her mind's presence, "Whuh-where?"

"To the Owlery, of course," Harry cheerfully gave answer. "We're sending Hedwig right away for that dress of yours, with a polite but subtly urgent message from that pesky _Boy Who Lived_. Urghs, aren't we just plain insufferable?"

~•~

 **Friday**

Life had not been unkind to Cormac McLaggen. Having been born into an upper-class Half-blood family blessed with a virtually inexhaustible inheritance, he had spent his childhood in an exceptionally affluent neighborhood. From an early age he had enjoyed the daily comforts of acquaintances consisting in balanced amounts of those that openly admired him and those he secretly despised, though mostly both these observations happened to apply to the very same individuals. He had come to understand the highest of expectations as something to be met, if not exceeded, and he had never experienced the meaning of paucity of any kind he could ever be aware of. Most importantly, the wandless magic of genetics had bestowed upon him a face and build that almost rendered his social standing redundant in life's great quest for reproduction, and he had just received enough between the ears alongside it to be capable of self-recognition, both of which were traits he quickly learned to take ample advantage of. Consequentially, his disposition was upbeat by default and rare were the occasions that temporarily managed to dampen it.

Today marked one such occasion.

He arrived at the hospital wing with a due sense of urgency. Surely matters would resolve themselves soon enough. No doubt Diggory had been unreasonably distraught when he had informed him of the mishap, and Cormac was all too familiar with the _Hufflepuff hero's_ proclivity for acting all concerned about the affairs of others. It could not possibly be as bad as the bloke had made it out to be. The thought was absurd. Just how wrong could some kid's harmless prank go, really? And yet despite his pathological optimism he could not quite shake off that latent, dreadful feeling of... whatever exactly it was.

Madam Pomfrey became aware of his approach while sorting through some files in one of multiple wooden cabinets in the room, looked up at him with a pained little smile and an irritatingly emotional look in her bright eyes. "Oh, Mr. McLaggen," she exhaled on a sigh, imbuing what should have been a simple greeting with fundamentally unsolicited sentimentality. "How good of you to come!"

"Yes, yes," Cormac dispensed with the nonsense straightaway. "Where is she?"

The matron mistook his impatience for the incurable unrest of the worried heart. "I must warn you," the ever-caring woman told him with a troubled shake of the head, "the poor thing is in bad condition and the mere sight of her may be a lot to take right now. Her medication also has her in an unresponsive state for the time being, so be advised she won't be able to talk to you."

"Nevertheless I must insist to see her," said Cormac, and only when the matron already beckoned him to follow her he somewhat anxiously added, "Unless there's anything contagious going on, of course."

Madam Pomfrey paused mid-step, looked minimally puzzled for a split second but then answered in the negative and went forth to lead him into the adjacent infirmary. The only bed occupied therein was the first on the left side, which at the very least was quickly reached. The matron turned around at the foot of the bed, gave Cormac one last vaguely meaningful look and finally stepped aside to reveal what up to now had been hidden from view.

There may as well have been a living, waking basilisk curled up on the sheets, gazing coldly into feeble human eyes widened in sheer terror, for instantly Cormac was petrified from top to bottom.

Respectfully lowering her head so as not to intrude in what she thought to be a private moment, Madam Pomfrey was close to tears. Meanwhile, Cormac appeared to be on the verge of articulation.

"My... God..." he breathed at last in utter disbelief as he faced the unimaginable.

"I know, I know," the matron readily tried to console him. "It's just... she's–"

"She's _hideous!"_ Cormac McLaggen suddenly cried out.

Wincing, Madam Pomfrey gaped at him in consternation. "I beg your par–"

"What the bloody hell happened to her?" a furious Cormac rolled right over her every word. "Who did this? Who?"

"She... she was hit by a spell that failed in almost every way it possibly could have," the profoundly confused woman haltingly explained to him. "An unfortunately misguided second year lad meant to transform her into a frog, so that he could then turn her back into her human self by giving her a kiss. He wanted to prove to her his undying love, it seems. He's also twelve years old and so deeply shaken by the results of his actions it was deemed best to deliver him into the care of his parents at once."

Cormac just stared at her for far longer than anyone would have felt comfortable with, his chest heaving heavily and his nostrils flaring in the same agitated rhythm. "Jesus Christ! What kind of retarded twit would try that kind of bollocks?"

If possible Madam Pomfrey's eyes got even rounder than they had already been. Cormac, indifferent to her erratic facial expressions, momentarily switched his attention from the matron to the recumbent and strikingly green-colored, splotchy-skinned occupant of the bed, then contorted his face in disgust and thought better of it. "So how long's this gonna take, exactly?"

Madam Pomfrey blinked once or twice. "It'll–it'll take a while before she's her fully human self again."

"A _while?"_ Cormac asked incredulously, promptly flaring up again. "What while? There's a fucking ball coming up, in case you weren't aware! Surely you don't expect me to take _that?"_

He made a dismissive gesture towards the bed, which the woman thrice his age followed with darting eyes despite herself. Then, however, she straightened herself, folded her hands and raised her chin.

"I can assure you, Mr. McLaggen, that you will not be taking Miss Vane to the Yule Ball or, for that matter, anywhere else outside of this hospital," she informed him sternly, her composure finally recovered with some help from indignation. "There is absolutely no way the poor girl is going to be on a dance floor of all places at any point during the next seven days. Not under my supervision, under which she fortunately shall remain."

The young man in front of her crossed his arms and regarded her with an almost accusing sort of look. "There must be something you can do!"

By now it were the woman's nostrils that flared with barely controlled anger. "I _am_ doing all that is to be done within a medically responsible scope of action."

"Well, she doesn't look like you're doing very much," Cormac McLaggen deprecatingly observed. "There's gotta be something you can give her!"

"I can only assume you are referring to my undivided attention, which in fact she is getting because luckily, as I'm sure you haven't failed to notice, there currently is nobody else in need of it."

He pursed his lips and shifted his weight from one foot to another; his tongue did an angry kind of thing on the inside of his lower lip. "Fucking great," he cursed in conclusion. "Really. Just great. Some ruddy bampot turns my date into a bloody toad two days before the ball and gets to go home early. What the hell am I supposed to do now, huh? Everybody not on their way to the station right now is either attending the ball or some kid whose parents don't want them home for Christmas! You think I'm going to make a total tit out of myself and go solo?"

Poppy Pomfrey took a very, very deep breath. "I believe you have already made sufficient enough of a _tit_ out of yourself, Mr. McLaggen," was what some tiny, daring part of her wanted very much to say. What with well-nigh unmatched composure she actually did say, however, was this:

"Well, it just so happens that positive magical energy has the potential to contribute considerably to the patient's healing process in this particular kind of case. If someone were to stay at her side uninterruptedly for the next forty-eight hours, channeling their very best thoughts and emotions, it may just suffice to turn her back to normal in time for the ball, which – if I'm not mistaken – is the only hope you've got left."

Cormac looked at her skeptically, which in a way really was quite astounding. It also illustrated that his face was not quite made to properly accommodate the deeper lines of skepticism. "But you told me something about a week," he said, "and now it's supposed to work in less than half that time? How's that possible?"

Madam Pomfrey stemmed her hands into her hips. "Have you spent three decades studying and practicing magical medicine?" The boy muttered something unintelligible. "Well, then I suggest you make yourself comfortable on that chair right there and try really hard to bring out the best in yourself. I need you to look at her–"

"You want me to _look_ at her?"

"Look at her, focus all your attention on her, and see not what has been made of her, but instead what she has always been and still remains underneath that superficial deformity. It's merely an appearance that has been altered, not the person behind it. If you can see that, you may yet be able to help not only her, but just as much yourself."

Cormac McLaggen perked a recently plucked eyebrow. "You sound like Trelawney."

"Really? When did Sybill start making any sense?" Shocked at her own outspokenness, Madam Pomfrey bit her tongue a second too late. Abashedly she cleared her throat. "At any rate, you'd better get to work. I shall be monitoring our progress."

And with that she left him standing there, and Cormac perplexedly watched her go until she disappeared in her study. Then he looked at that ominous chair next to the bed, then reluctantly at the weird humanoid amphibian thankfully covered mostly under a white duvet, then at his golden Rolex and finally back at what truly had to be the most uninviting chair he had ever set his eyes on.

"Well, shit."

~•~

 **Saturday**

"What a week, huh?"

"Tell me about it!"

"Couple of days ago I honestly thought I'd be home by now," Ron indeed proceeded to tell him about it. "Had my mind set. Join my parents, Bill and Charlie and maybe even Percy if the tosser cared to get his priorities straight, suffer their mockery for being the usual family let-down and then enjoy a cozy little Christmas without any of that Yule Ball hassle. And now, weirdly enough..."

"You're on board the Yule Ball express, headed straight for the hassle," Harry complemented as he pulled back his blanket and seated himself on his four-poster bed. He smiled at his absently nodding friend who was sitting at the edge of his own bed right across from him. "And you didn't even need my help. Imagine that."

"I did need it a little bit," Ron reminded him. "Yours and Hermione's."

"True." Harry chuckled at the vivid memory of the scene. "Man, you wouldn't have taken the hint even if Luna had had a flashing neon sign on top of her head that read _I Fancy Ronald Weasley_."

Ron looked perfectly flabbergasted at that. "You think she actually fancies me? Like seriously?"

"Ron," Harry lamely replied, his eyes half-lidded, "she looks at you like you're some kind of rock star."

"Really?" Ron asked, not yet convinced. Then suddenly he looked quite chuffed with himself. "Well, I don't like to brag but I _can_ tell the difference between a guitar and a trumpet."

Laughing, Harry put away his glasses in a small wooden case on his bedside table and then went on to pull his blanket up over his chest. The two friends exchanged good night wishes and drew their bed curtains close, and making himself comfortable amidst his pillows Harry at last found himself alone with his thoughts, which – complex and multifarious as they certainly were – really came down to:

 _Hermione._

Meanwhile, not far from the boy slowly drifting into realms of dreams and longing, lay the sole inspiration for all his mind's projections. Strikingly similar in many ways she seemed. Like the boy, the girl lay on her back. Like the boy, the girl had folded her hands on top of her chest. And not unlike the boy's maverick strands of hair pointed hither and yon, her untamed mane fanned out over the pillows around her head. Unlike the boy, however, whose eyes were gently closed and whose lips faintly curled upward in a mien of enviable contentedness, the girl still held her eyes wide open and was eminently far from sleep. Her thoughts, though in their quintessence surely of some concise simplicity, unfolded something like this:

 _Okay, so... tomorrow's the day, then. Good. It's good, right? Perfectly fine. I'm as prepared as I possibly could be. Truly. It's just a dance, really. And I know all the steps. It's really not that complicated. We aren't exactly talking about supersymmetric quantum field theories, here. Just some rudimentary anatomy and a couple of harmless laws of motion. Very Newtonian. Basic stuff. Also, I finally got the right dress, which definitely helps. Thanks to Harry, I might add. And Hedwig, of course. About Harry, though. Goodness! I'm going to be dancing with Harry tomorrow. My dear Harry, my best friend. Only that we aren't going to that ball as friends, right? Is everything going to change tomorrow? Oh my, did I just say good night to Harry in a strictly platonic understanding for the last time? By this time tomorrow, will we be something else? Are we already something else? Have we always been something else? What are we, even?_

 _Gosh, what a confusing mess of a week it's been! Even for a girl that can make cupcakes levitate with a flick of a wooden stick. I still can't believe any of it. Not really. My brain just doesn't seem able to grasp it quite right. I tried to put it into a formula, of course, but I'm afraid my usual approach doesn't apply here. Which makes me really, really queasy. Equations have always had a comforting quality about them, for me. They work. They make sense. Are Harry and I equal like that? Are we two ways of saying one and the same thing? Is the one incomplete without the other? And what would a psychotherapist have to say about any of that? And, more importantly, why should I care? I know all too well how to be alone and self-reliant. Doesn't mean I have to keep doing it, though._

 _I really need to go to sleep. I need to be fully rested tomorrow. I can't go to the ball looking like a ghoul. Oh dear, what_ will _I look like? Relax, Hermione. Calm down, little heart. You'll just make an utter fool of yourself but I'm sure Harry will have tissues. He always takes care of you like that. Seriously, he does. It's going to be fine. The things he said to me these last couple of days... wow. Does he really mean them? Can it be? Does he really feel the same? He wouldn't say those things if he didn't. Not Harry. At any rate, we're doing this together. Like we always do, strangely enough. It always comes back to Harry somehow. It's like he's the gravitational center of my life. Yeah, screw that psychotherapist. I don't give a toss whether that's healthy. Do I seem like a balanced person to you? Hopeless cause here, so get off my back. I've got a dance to go to and a dress to put on and a nose to powder and willfully rebellious hair to take care of and..._

 _Merlin's knickers! What was I_ thinking?!

~Ω~

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Flowers of Evil:_ Prompted by the name of Viktor's date for the ball, Hermione recites the first line of the _Hymne à la Beauté_ from Charles Baudelaire's _Les Fleurs du mal,_ first published in 1857. It roughly translates to, "Do you hail from Heaven or from the abyss, oh Beauty?"

 _Sprechen Sie Deutsch:_ The German line Hermione speaks translates to, "[...] even though just a little bit."

 _Super Mario:_ Princess Peach and the fake mustache are references to the long-running series of video games created by Nintendo and industry legend Shigeru Miyamoto, with the eponymous plumber and eventual company mascot making his first appearance in the arcade game _Mario Bros._ in 1983, before setting out to conquer privileged homes across the world on the Nintendo Entertainment System and its numerous successors from 1985 onward. While somewhat technically correct in regard to his final name, my dear reader texan-muggle reminded me that Mario first sprang to life as Jumpman in the 1981 release of _Donkey Kong._ Originally intending to call him Mr. Video, Miyamoto himself once said that, had he kept that name, the character would most likely have faded into oblivion. My brain concurs, apparently.

According to former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the character was supposed to be named Ossan even before that, which means _middle-aged guy._ Now that would have been something! Can you even imagine the unparalleled success story that would have been _Super Middle-Aged Guy?_

 _XKCD:_ When Hermione, in her inner nighttime monologue, mentions her fruitless attempts to put Harry and herself into a neat little formula, it's a reference to #55 of the webcomic series XKCD by Randall Munroe. That one, in my preferred, canon-inspired but canon-transcending interpretation of the character, is just a perfect encapsulation of Hermione.

 _Concerning Ron and Luna:_ These two, at least to me, are frankly entirely random. The only reason I have now put them together in two of my stories is a website called Portkey, where I did much of my own fanfictional reading back in the day when I first discovered this crazy underbelly of the literary world. There, eight particular characters were only permitted to be featured in published stories within specific ships, and for some reason Ron and Luna were one of them. They often appeared as a couple in stories that focused on Harry and Hermione as well, and without ever intending to I read quite a bit about the two of them. I have, however, never developed any strong conviction about them, so having them get together in my own writing endeavors is really no more than a nod to that place and the time I spent there. A nostalgic sort of thing, really.


	9. Momentum

**• Chapter IX •**

 **Momentum**

She left the Great Hall through the huge two-winged door that had been kept wide open all night long, then crossed the adjoining foyer at the urgent yet simultaneously restrained pace of a fugitive wishing to avoid unwanted attention. Already the coalescing sounds of music, voices high and low and some sporadic clinking of crystal glasses grew fainter behind her, assuring her of the increasing distance she so desperately sought. On her way to the dearly desired exit, a promise of respite and relief, she passed a trio of chatting attendees of the ball that regarded her with genial smiles, and she tried to return them to the best of her momentarily impaired ability. At last she reached the door she had aimed for, with some effort pushed it open and finally stepped out into the crisp cold air of a white winter's night.

As soon as the iron-bound door fell shut behind her, Hermione Granger wept.

~•~

"Let's hear it, then," said Ron as he nervously readjusted the ruffled collar of his indisputably antiquated dress robe for approximately the seventeenth time. "How do we look?"

Harry, standing right next to him in an outfit that supposedly was the fashionable best of both worlds according to the catalogue he had picked it from – being neither a classical wizard's formal attire nor quite a contemporary Muggle gentleman's suit, and really just a minimally old-fashioned tailcoat – scrutinized their reflections in the large wall-mounted mirror in front of them for a moment. Looking back at him were the impressive results of almost twenty minutes of extremely intense and decidedly frantic grooming and dressing. Harry, for the first time ever, was trying out contact lenses, and his eyes did not approve. Neither of the contact lenses nor of the reflection in the mirror, that is, and least of all of that ever-untamable hair of his...

"D'you want my _honest_ opinion?"

Ron let go of the hand-me-down family heirloom he was doomed to be publicly shamed in and for once dropped his restless hands to his sides, his shoulders drooping. "No."

"Smashing," Harry declared, bubbling over with mock enthusiasm. "Absolutely smashing!"

"I know, right?" Ron joined on the spot, twisting himself into a proper pose with his stomach sucked in and his chest imitating an angry blowfish. "Just look at these glorious bastards."

"Wickedly handsome."

"Aye."

"The very embodiment of masculinity."

"You got it."

"Even Sean Connery would shalute our indishputable shex appeal."

"Sean who?"

Harry heaved a resigning sigh and made for the bathroom's exit. "Let's just get this over with."

"Do we have to?" Ron asked, the blowfish fully deflated. "Is it too late to skive?"

"Absholutely."

Harry switched off the lights (Yes, there was indeed a switch and it controlled all the unnaturally bright candles in the room. Don't ask.) and with a groaning Ron shambling after him he went ahead to bravely face what surely was destined to be a yuletide night to remember in one way or the other, ably masking that he was on the verge of what he could only guess would be an actual panic attack. Oh, well. No time for that now.

~•~

" _Voilà! Ô, ô, ô... magnifique!"_

"D'you really think so? Do I not rather look like a woefully transparent _prétendant_ to you?"

Fleur Delacour stemmed her hands into her shapely hips and regarded Hermione's reflection in the large wall-mounted mirror in front of them with an indignant frown. "You dare insult my work of many hours, _mademoiselle?"_

Horrified, Hermione's face blanched underneath subtly rouged cheeks. "Oh! No, no! I didn't mean it like that! It's just that your efforts seem tantamount to those of an ice sculptor condemned to take their art into the middle of the Sahara."

"That is ridiculous," an overtly unimpressed Fleur pointed out with a dismissive wave of her hand, and on some stubbornly suppressed level even Hermione had to concede that much. "You, my dear, are my masterpiece."

Hogwarts' most skeptical witch fittingly perked an eyebrow. "Measured solely by the magnitude of the challenge I suppose I must be."

"Will you stop it already, you silly thing?" Fleur admonished her with some exasperation. "You are a challenge not for a stylist but for a therapist!"

"Up until a week ago I was content to have given up on both."

"Is that why you've been using that tincture to reduce the size of your front teeth?"

Hermione sullenly scrunched up her face at that. "I shouldn't have told you about that."

"I think a _soupçon_ of _vanité_ is a step in the right direction for you, _non?_ Just to get away from all this pitiful self-loathing, I mean."

"A step on a steep downhill road that suddenly ends without warning at the precipice of narcissism," Hermione countered. "Yesterday I was the nerdy bookworm happy and eager to learn and understand, tomorrow I commit suicide because I came in second at the Miss Soho beauty pageant."

Fleur laughed at that, and it sounded like a playful little rivulet trickling down a crystal fountain, if not quite literally so. "I believe they are very fond of fake teeth at those things," she teasingly told her, "so you may actually stand a better chance than you think."

Hermione glared at the giggling blonde via the mirror over the dressing table, crossing her arms. "Laugh it up, princess. You're obviously unfamiliar with the _slight_ inconvenience of looking like a chipmunk with a perennial bad hair day."

"And just look at you now," Fleur exclaimed well-nigh rapturously as she leaned down over Hermione's bare shoulder, and jokingly she added, "We should just ditch the boys and take each other for a spin, you and I."

Hermione blushed, then felt a bit silly for it. Deciding that coming from Fleur Delacour the suggestion had to be immensely flattering regardless of one's sexual orientation, she discarded the weirdness.

"D'you think he'll like it, though?" she asked as rising anxiety at the approaching hour got the better of her. She turned her head ever so slightly to have another look at that insanely intricate chignon of Fleur's doing, which euclidean geometry would not suffice to properly describe. "Me, I mean. Visually."

"Like it?" Fleur asked in most apparent disbelief. _"Chérie,_ when poor Harry lays his eyes on you tonight, he will have thought his last innocent thought about you."

The rush of heat returned to Hermione's face with a vengeance. "That's one way of putting it," she mumbled, hopelessly flustered. Quite unwittingly she moved her right hand along the flawless shape and curvature of the braid that went along the side of her head and met with its twin from the other side at the back to join one another in aforementioned chignon.

"It is the only way," Fleur insisted, swatting Hermione's stray hand away from her keratinous piece of art. "You already are more woman than girl, Hermione. Tonight you'll make our little big _héros_ catch up with you."

"Honestly, Fleur," said Hermione, just a tad scandalized, "you're making this sound less like a school dance and more like a wedding night. My dress is still blue, isn't it?"

" _Ô,_ but where _le jeu de l'amour_ is afoot the dance is but an _ouverture,_ where every step is a _manœuvre_ , every touch temptation and every look an invitation."

Hermione would very much have liked to loosen her collar a bit, if she had only had one. "I'm fairly sure the dancing will remain the main course for tonight, Fleur," she impressed on her acquaintance of less than six hours. "Let's go with a little more Jane Austen and a little less teenage pregnancy, shall we?"

It was the Beauxbatons champion's turn to be taken aback. _"Mon dieu,_ who is the one with the dirty mind here? I was merely hinting at the _inévitabilité_ of a true love's kiss."

"Is that so?" Hermione wryly asked. "Well, that definitely takes the pressure off, thank you very much."

Fleur Delacour groaned in frustration, which also was a sound far more pleasant than it had any right to be, and already it had fluently passed into another delightful little laugh. "Come now, my _petit_ _papillon_. It is time to come out of your _cocon_ and spread your wings."

Hermione eyed the book she had turned a few pages in when at times she had been waiting for her hair to dry or while Fleur had been busy braiding it so masterfully. When acting on some instinct she finally reached out and grabbed it, she stopped short when she noticed the way Fleur looked at her. "I–I just feel saver when I have one with me," she haltingly explained herself. "And maybe it'll get boring at some point when Harry has to do some Triwizard celebrity things or whatever."

Fleur sighed a wispy little sigh, and her dark blue eyes spoke of genuine sympathy.

Hermione, however, was not yet ready to give up. "A fellow countryman of yours once wrote, 'Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.' Surely you can't object to that? Granted, I have read things before so hopelessly inane I genuinely feared I'd suffer permanent brain damage, and my mother once sprained her ankle while doing the Foxtrott, if you can believe that. But still, my point stands. I think."

"Indeed," the young Frenchwoman allowed with a smile. "But there is a time and place for everything, my dear, and tonight is not the time for reading. It is the time for dancing." She paused and quietly watched Hermione come to terms with this particularly disagreeable truth. "Now let go of that leather-bound lifebelt of yours," and with long and slender fingers Fleur helped her along a bit, "take my hand instead, stand up... like this – will you look at you in this dress! – and come with me. Your safety tonight will not be found on the cold pages of a book, but in the warm arms of your _amant."_

Gulping, Hermione let herself be dragged from the room and on towards what with every tottering step was beginning to feel more and more like her certain demise.

~•~

"Oi, mate, the Middle Ages owled," Seamus Finnigan jovially greeted his fellow redhead housemate with a clap on the back. "They want their fashion back!"

"Hilarious," Ron deadpanned, his eyes half-lidded. "Instant classic."

"Aw, don't be such a wet blanket now," Seamus told him with a good-natured laugh. "Just look at me in this dreadful green thing! Obviously, being Irish I just _have_ to look like a flipping leprechaun, don't I?"

"That some family tradition, too?" Harry joined in, trying his best to appear perfectly relaxed and collected, which just so happened to be the exact opposite of how he was actually feeling.

"Kind of," Seamus replied, genuinely relaxed and collected. "My mum keeps insisting that green looks good on me. I keep telling her it's not the green on me I'm worried about, but the me in the green." Something then caught his attention in the gathering crowd around them. "Ah, there's my date. Better get over there. I'll see you slowcoaches later, eh?"

Harry and Ron nodded their heads and watched him meet up with Lavender Brown, who was wearing a ruffled, knee-long red dress. "They look like a Christmas tree," Harry impartially observed.

"And I look like an exhumed contemporary of Godric Gryffindor," said Ron.

"Well-preserved, though."

"Thanks." Ron's eyes lazily swept the throng that was filling the foyer and waiting for the Great Hall to be opened. "Whoa, look at that one!"

"Which one?"

"The one that's glowing!" Instead of pointing his finger he merely nodded his head. Looking the way he did, this was not one of those rare moments in his life where attention was something he actively sought. "Looks even more ridiculous than me."

Harry hesitated for a second once he found the glowing one. "I, uh... I'm pretty sure that's your date."

"What? No way."

The girl in question swirled around on her heels just then, her bright round eyes quickly finding the two boys watching her not quite as inconspicuously as they thought. "Yeah, that's definitely Luna."

"Mother of Merlin."

"Doubtful," said Harry.

"Hi, hullo," the natively offbeat Ravenclaw girl cheerily greeted them a second later. "What a night, huh? Isn't this exciting?" At befuddling odds with her words her level, faintly lulling voice made her sound like a hypnotist in session. "Oh, you look just like I pictured you in my mind, Ronald. Absolutely fabulous!"

"Yeah, uh, thanks, uh." Ron stared at that luminescent dress of hers, momentarily indeed hypnotized not as much by her voice as by the human rainbow in front of him. "You–you're very... colorful."

She looked down at her radiative self, then back up at Ron with the widest grin figuratively lighting up her face almost as much as her dress literally lit up the immediate area around her. "I know," she stated rather matter-of-factly. "It's actually bioluminescent. It's glowing because of the millions of Glitterglims living in the fabric. Can you believe that?"

Ron mutely goggled at her as his brain made its best effort to avoid an epileptic seizure, amongst other problems. "Fcourse," he croaked at last, then awkwardly cleared his throat and just babbled away, "So where's Hermione and that mysterious closet lover of hers, anyway? I bet it's one of those sleazy Durmstrang gits. They've had their eyes on our Hogwarts girls this whole time! Except for Viktor Krum, of course. He's fine. Wait, didn't he mean to ask Hermione, too? Nah, she's probably not even coming, is she? Wait, it's not McLaggen after all, is it? I haven't seen his pompous arse around. Not that I would be looking for his arse, specifically."

Luna giggled. "I've heard he's in the infirmary for some reason," she informed him with a shrug.

"Good," Ron commented. "I won't have to punch him there, then."

"But what exactly do you mean about Hermi–oh, look! The door's opening!" Luna basically interrupted herself. "Oh, wow! I saw this in a dream once, except everybody was floating there."

The excited chitchat around them, continuously interspersed with masculine chuckles and feminine giggles, immediately found itself replaced by gasps of awe and expressions of astonishment when the room was suddenly bathed in bright white light as the heavy two-winged door was swung open by some invisible hand to reveal a Great Hall as resplendent as no one in attendance had ever before seen it.

"What have they done to my dining room?" Ron asked nobody in particular. "Can you believe this, Harry? Mate?" He turned first left then right to look for his oddly absent friend and found him, much to his puzzlement, a step behind and away from the collectively captivated crowd, staring as the only person in the hall into the opposite direction and up towards the top of the stairway. There was some lone pretty thing coming down the steps Ron had never seen before. Probably one of those Beauxbatons models.

 _Wait a minute._

He did a double take, and then his jaw joined Harry's jaw about halfway down towards the floor.

~•~

"Wait, wait, wait!"

Fleur came to an abrupt halt just as she reached the corner to the grand staircase and turned around to face what for the moment may as well have been called her hostage. "Why, why, why?" she asked her, visibly amused. "You are not thinking still of fetching that book of yours, are you?"

"No, it's just... just my breath I need to catch," Hermione answered indeed a bit breathlessly. "You go on ahead. I'll be right with you." Fleur gave her a dubious look, which prompted Hermione to limply wave her hand at her. "I swear I'm not about to make a run for it," she assured her as she sought support at the first wall willing and able to grant it.

Fleur made a small step towards her. "Are you sure you will be all right, dear? I should not seek help?"

Hermione shook her head, just lightly so as not to challenge her questionable ability to remain firmly on both her feet. "A minute is all I need. Just a minute."

A moment of hesitancy passed before Fleur exhaled a sigh of concession. "Very well. But if you aren't down there when the minute is up, I'll be right back up here, _compris?"_

" _Oui,"_ Hermione affirmed with an unsteady little smile. _"Merci."_

Fleur turned and made a step away from her, with a last narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder added, "One minute," and finally proceeded to descend the stairs and with that disappeared from sight.

Hermione leaned back against the wall where there happened to hang a large old tapestry depicting the building of Hogwarts, which in this moment found its value not in its artistic craftsmanship but in the comfort it supplied to Hermione's back. There was a magical protective layer cast over it which the staff of the Louvre would be envious of, so no harm was inflicted on art of old. Frankly, though, and somewhat atypically so, she did not really think about that at all in this particular moment in time. She had retained barely enough situational awareness to avoid leaning her head against it as well, lest the entirely unprotected and far more ephemeral piece of art on top of it be ruined.

 _You can do this,_ her thoughts instead repeated over and over again.

"I can do this," her voice echoed them in a whisper, her eyes closed and her breathing deliberately calm and steady to fight her frantic heart.

 _You have to,_ her thoughts went on in the secret chamber of her mind. _There's no turning back now. You have to go through with this. You cannot let him down. You mustn't. He needs you._

"Of all the ways I thought he'd ever need me in," she quietly spoke to herself, "this was never one."

 _And yet here you are. So just go with it. You said you would, therefore you will. And it's not like you don't want to. You're just afraid, and that's okay. Means you've got something to lose. Means you've got something worth keeping. If you don't go down there, you have already lost._

"Fine," she said, finding herself rather convinced by her own argument. In matters of self-motivation, a little multiple personality disorder really goes a long way sometimes.

Hermione straightened herself up and made sure her dress was in order. She was not quite as used to walking in high heels as right then she would very much have liked to be, but she knew that strangely enough she was fully capable of dancing in them, for she had indeed more experience in the latter than she had in the former.

Carefully, in nearly clandestine a fashion, she leaned around the corner to scout the area down below. Much to her subsequent trepidation there already was a throng of markedly well-attired people gathered in the antehall, all smiles and laughter. Some kind of low-key affair like, say, a funeral would have seemed like a preferable occasion right then, though judging by the way her heart was going crazy underneath her ribcage it would most likely have been her own. Which, all things considered, really would have served the same purpose.

Yet instead of literally meeting her demise, Hermione Granger took the longest, deepest breath of her life, lightly pulled up the sides of her dress with nervous fingers desperate to hold onto something less tenuous than her garment's delicate fabric, and at last her right foot gingerly touched down on the first step into the daunting domain of utter uncertainty.

~•~

As his eyes were fixed on that singular feminine figure descending the stairs with almost enough mesmerizing elegance in her measured stride to perfectly mask that equally endearing awkwardness that subtly accentuated her every fatalistic step; as he saw her take a shaky breath through parted lips whose resonance he unwittingly felt inside his own quivering chest; and as her shy eyes at last flickered up to find and meet and lock with his captivated own, her lips curling faintly into a small uncertain smile, Harry's brain had thoroughly lost all cognizance of space and time. That is until at last the time came when Hermione occupied the space right in front of him.

He swallowed then, his throat inopportunely constricted. "You're speechless," he finally managed to eject, and then his eyelids had a little seizure of their own. "I mean, I'm gorgeous!"

Hermione, for more than one reason, was absolutely unable to hide the smile that conquered the entirety of her face or to keep her cheeks from matching the color of the two strategically placed spots of rouge thereon. "Thank me," she replied in matching style with a slight bow of her head. "And right back at you." She sheepishly looked down at herself then. "This is all Fleur, though. Really."

Harry's eyes vaguely followed the trail of hers along the length of her body and then slowly back up again. "All I see is you," he mumbled in a daze, aware of little else but her very corporeal existence, and least of all the effects his words in turn were having on her.

He shook himself, visibly even, and pointedly looked at what he deemed an innocuous part of her dress. "So, uh, blue's the color, then."

"Periwinkle, yes," Hermione replied, grinning. "It's very important."

Ron leaned into their general vicinity just then. "Bloody hell, Herms! You're ruining our friendship here, you know, flaunting your goods like that!"

She rolled her eyes and looked at him with a playful scowl. "Despite my objection to that slight misrepresentation of both my outfit and my attitude," she said to him, "I'll take that as a compliment, Ron. You're looking very... commemorative yourself."

He made a face at her. "Anyhow, look who's glowing," he then smoothly introduced Luna, who seemed quite happy about it.

"Golly, Hermione!" the wide-eyed blonde addressed her with sedated amazement. "I'd have to be glowing ten times stronger than this to take any attention away from you tonight. Not that I was meaning to, or anything like that."

Hermione thanked her with a bashful smile. "You're absolutely radiant yourself, Luna. Literally, yes, but also in every other possible sense. Truly."

"That is very nice of you to say," Luna observed even as her eyes began to shimmer with the harbingers of future tears. A thereby thoroughly discomfited Ron went straight for his most trusted emergency measures and loudly cleared his throat. "Where are your dates, anyway?" he hastily asked Harry and Hermione. "It's getting a bit late, isn't it?"

The two exchanged the briefest of glances, almost going unnoticed. Harry pursed his lips and Hermione bit hers. Luna regarded Ron with a rather mystified look even as she was still busy wiping the moisture from her eyes, careful not to ruin her multicolored – albeit not luminescent – make-up.

"Actually," Harry hesitantly replied, "both our dates are, uh, present as we speak."

Ron's head jerked back, his brow furrowed. He looked to and fro, twice over, but found only dozens of couples that one by one were making their way into the Great Hall. "Present _here_ , or..."

Hermione, eyes on the ground and hands loosely folded in front of her, inched closer towards Harry with two or three tiny sideways steps; a smile tugged at a corner of his lips as he noticed her movement from the corner of his eye. Ron silently observed the increasingly suspicious scene that unfolded in front of him and his eyes continuously became narrower as the plot thickened. He was, however, entirely unaware of the way Luna's eyes confusedly darted back and forth between him and his two friends. Not that it necessarily would have helped him much.

"Whaddaya... " Ron stammered, "Whaddaya on about now?"

Harry scratched the back of his head. "Yeah, uhm..." he began only to trail off into an awkward pause, hesitated, and finally took Hermione's right hand gingerly with his left, lacing his fingers through hers while trying his best to keep them from trembling too much. Within an instant she tensed all over, goosebumps running across every prickling inch of exposed skin at this kind of touch that had never occurred between them before. He had taken her by the hand on numerous occasions before, of course, but never like this. Never as a statement, an announcement of its own.

After a week of silence and insecurity, pretense and evasion, this simplest of gestures seemed to communicate something as much between the two of them as to the world around them that had not yet been put into a spoken word by either one of them. Then again, Hermione also feared she might be severely overrating the gravity of the moment, for naturally she neither could nor did know that Harry was quite overwhelmed by the exact same sensation.

Meanwhile, Ron's wary eyes drifted to the scene of the crime: his best friends' markedly entwined hands. A smoking gun if there ever was one.

And then, suddenly and on a sharp intake of breath that made a highly intrigued Luna wince quite violently, his eyes at once took the shape of Quidditch goal hoops and shot back up to the anxious faces of the two freshly caught criminals.

"Blimey!" he hoarsely exclaimed. "What is the meaning of this? Wha-wha–what is going on?"

"We're sorry!" Harry quickly came as much to Ron's aid as to their own defense. "We didn't mean for this to be a big secret or anything like that! It just turned out that way somehow. It got a bit confusing for everybody involved and we just didn't know how to handle it and–"

"What are you talking about?" Ron interrupted him, his disbelief as yet unmitigated. "Aren't you two not here as friends?!"

Harry gulped; Hermione whimpered. They both looked a bit confounded, the reasons for which surely were no less than twofold.

"Yes," Harry finally replied.

"No," Hermione answered in perfect simultaneity.

Harry looked at Hermione, and with mutual perplexity exchanged between the two she looked back.

"No," said Harry, turning back to Ron.

"Yes," said Hermione as she did likewise.

"What?" they both asked each other as once more their heads swiveled about and their eyes reconnected.

"Why not both?" Harry then asked after a moment of bilateral cerebral entanglement.

"Sure," Hermione approved. "I don't see why these should be two mutually exclusive states. We haven't suddenly stopped being friends, right?"

"Of course not," Harry agreed wholeheartedly.

They turned their heads to address Ron again.

"Both," said Hermione with a curt nod.

"Both," Harry echoed and mirrored her.

Ron blankly stared at them with his lower jaw hanging loosely about for a bit, until suddenly it snapped shut as he turned to face Luna with nearly accusatory a look in his eyes. "Did you know about this?"

"Didn't you?" a thoroughly baffled Luna asked him in return. "Didn't everybody?"

He just kept staring at her now while both Harry and Hermione watched the scene unfold in front of them, the two of them momentarily relegated to the roles of shamefaced spectators.

"I thought it was blatantly obvious from the way they've been behaving around each other," Luna continued to expound with a couple of helpless sidelong glances into Harry's and Hermione's direction. "Never more so than on that day we built the snowman. That's when I knew. And I thought you did, too. I just didn't say anything because the two looked so adorably embarrassed about it all."

The two in question blushed quite fiercely at that and busied themselves with a very casual gander at various spots in the surrounding area, none of which they could have reported anything substantial about, yet all the while their hands remained unalteredly intertwined.

"Much like they do right now," Luna casually added.

After vacantly staring some more, in what seemed to be a sort of conclusion to the play, Ron made a grumpy face. "You know," he said at last, "I'd say that after five kids in the family the supply of brain cells was simply depleted, but Percy came before me and Ginny a year after me and so there goes my theory. Speaking of which, where the hell is the little she-devil? Didn't want to tell me who she's going with, so that I wouldn't _interfere_ and _make a scene._ Pah! As if I ever–whoa, whoa, whoa! Is that Neville? _Neville_ asked my little sister on a date? _My_ sister?"

Three heads turned to follow his withering gaze and found Neville and Ginny just stepping into the Great Hall arm in arm, blissfully ignorant of their purported folly.

"That sneaky bastard." Grimly shaking his head, Ron then regarded Harry and Hermione. "And you two... I don't even know what to say to the two of you. I am _extremely_ disappointed."

"Really?" Hermione worriedly asked with the timidity of the guilty.

"Nah," said Ron. "I just wanted to feel important for a change. Honestly, though. It seems you two could've snogged each other senseless right in front of my nose and I would've been hard-pressed to figure out what's going on. Not that I think you should've, mind you. Anyway, you go on ahead and do your dancing thingy now. I've got a Neville to kick in the Longbottom. Come, Luna. You may assist me."

Giggling merrily the Ravenclaw girl let herself be dragged off towards the Great Hall by her freshly and somewhat surprisingly determined companion, waving happily at Harry and Hermione as they went their way.

That the foyer by now had cleared out considerably, with the last few regular attendees following Ron and Luna into the Great Hall to find their preassigned seats, was not the sole reason a peculiar sort of silence set around Harry and Hermione, though it certainly served to emphasize it all the more since it literally grew quieter with every passing second.

"I'd say that went pretty well," Hermione at last spoke up, if only to keep that nascent anxiety at bay that seemed to increase with every wide-eyed couple she witnessed crossing the entrance into the Great Hall, each of them like a tick on the clock of the approaching hour. In a low mumble she added, "All things considered."

An indistinct grunt came from Harry. "I've a feeling I'll have a thing or two to answer for tomorrow, though."

"We should've told him, shouldn't we?"

"Maybe. Probably," he reluctantly conceded. "But I wasn't sure... I just didn't know... I'd never spoken to him about this before. About my, uhm... my feelings for... for you, and how they–"

Hermione would very much have liked to hear the rest of that sentence and then most likely – and not exclusively out of habit – to have inquired even further, but just then they were interrupted when Professor McGonagall called out their names as she approached them at a brisk pace, herself clad in a classy if decidedly old-fashioned dress robe that was subtly accentuated with the colors of House Gryffindor.

"Well, don't just stand about there like a pair of abandoned ducklings," she told them. "It's high time we got things organized around here. Come, come." Already she motioned for them to follow her, but then paused mid-turn to readjust her spectacles. "My, my! Miss Granger! You truly keep exceeding even the greatest of expectations in all regards imaginable." The professor's appraising look then switched from the once again scarlet face of the girl to the just as exquisitely attired and visibly uncomfortable boy at her side, whom she scrutinized intently from the bottom up. The satisfied expression on her face only faltered when her twinkling eyes at last reached the very top of his head. "Mr. Potter, couldn't you have done _something_ about the hair?"

Harry looked ashamed underneath his perpetual bed head. "But I tried, Professor! I really did!"

There was a mild note of doubt in the ensuing moment of silence. "Ah, yes. Of course you did," said McGonagall with a lingering look at the pitiful result of his efforts, then cleared her throat. "Well done, Mr. Potter."

Harry heaved a despondent sigh, and with a sullen mien set out to follow Professor McGonagall. When he felt a light squeeze and a tender caress at his hand, his eyes first wandered downward and then up to the person at his side. The smile she gave him quickly and quite magically made him forget all about his hair-related plight.

"And here we all are, finally," Professor McGonagall announced seconds later, and a hitherto somewhat preoccupied Harry and Hermione suddenly found themselves standing amidst a familiar group of couples, who collectively greeted them with affable smiles and some humorously overstated bows and curtsies.

Hermione's pleasantly dream-like state was instantly replaced with an acute case of dreadful self-consciousness at the staggering sight of the young ladies now surrounding her: fetchingly petite Cho in maize, positively ravishing Céleste in burgundy and the usual Fleur in indigo. Physical manifestations of the very idea of beauty, the lot of them. Hermione desperately tried to find solace in the thought that at least she was not wearing bubblegum.

Meanwhile, seeing ever-winsome Cedric, broad-shouldered Roger and bearded Viktor in their tailored suits and tailcoats, the lot of them taller than him to varying but altogether discouraging degrees, Harry felt like the awkward little brother at an older and much cooler sibling's birthday party. This may have been the only moment in his life in which he tried his hardest to focus on the better part of the fact that at least he had thwarted the sinister schemes of an evil dark wizard twice or thrice.

Their inner turmoil notwithstanding, Fleur Delacour regarded the two of them with a delighted sort of pride, Viktor Krum bowed deepest (and sincerest) of all and Cedric Diggory practically beamed at them as his bright eyes switched back and forth between Harry and Hermione.

"Nice to see you figured things out for yourselves after all," he addressed Harry, who merely looked at him without a hint of comprehension in response. "You and Hermione," Cedric was thereby prompted to elaborate. "That's what I meant to talk to you about before our first dancing lesson, remember? I had a casual little chat about the ball with Hermione that day. Lasted less than two minutes, I think, and yet I heard enough to figure that this right here," and he pointed at the two of them, "would be the perfect solution to your alleged problems."

"But I barely spoke ten words," Hermione complained, embarrassed all anew. Harry's face, meanwhile, was frozen in an expression of belated enlightenment with his mouth silently forming a corresponding _Ooooh,_ something of a less sophisticated sibling of _Eureka_. The one you do not tell other people about.

"And about nine of them were about Harry," Cedric answered with a cheeky little grin even as Hermione currently favored the floor where things to look at were concerned.

"You caught on a lot quicker than I did, then," Viktor interposed with a chuckle. "But in my defense, these two do like to make things complicated."

"I don't _like_ it that way," mumbled Harry.

"I don't _make_ it that way," Hermione muttered.

A bout of laughter went through the circle of couples, and even Professor McGonagall could not quite contain a little contribution of her own at the sight of the shamefaced duo whose hands, as it did not escape the ever-observant professor's awareness, still refused to let go of one another.

"Well, then," the deputy headmistress in timely fashion steered everybody's attention back to the matter at hand. "Let us take a moment to gather our focus now, for the ceremony is about to begin. You are all well prepared and I have no doubt that each and every single one of you will represent their respective school with the utmost diligence. More importantly, however, I expect all of you to do this _together,_ for the Yule Ball first and foremost is of course a celebration of unity."

She paused and looked at the intently listening youths gathered around her. If their performance on the dance floor would only so much as come close to matching their splendid appearances, there should be little to worry about. Alas, there were always things to worry about, no matter how nice they looked.

"The champions," she went on, "will be standing over there on the right side and their partners here on the left side of the door. You will be announced in pairs of two by that fine gentleman at the entrance, and in that fashion will enter the Great Hall one pair at a time, beginning with our guests' champions and ending with our youngest. I want to see even and measured steps and heads held high. Let not all dignity and grandeur be lost just yet. What the twentieth century has started I have no doubt the twenty-first will see finished, but that woeful day has not yet come. Off to your positions now! We'll be beginning shortly."

Collegial nods and smiles of encouragement were exchanged as the four champions and their designated companions parted ways as per Professor McGonagall's concise instructions. Somewhere amidst the hectic huddle of human bodies and for the first time since first they had found each other, the interwoven hands of Harry and Hermione reluctantly broke touch and each felt colder for the other's absence. The shy smiles they shared were solely for the two of them, and a slightly woozy Harry came dangerously close to stumbling straight into Professor McGonagall as she crossed the champions' path.

"Shoulders, Mr. Krum," she curtly reminded the gangly Durmstrang champion as she strode swiftly past them all to make her way to wherever else her presence was required next.

Viktor obediently straightened his habitually hunched shoulders while Cedric quietly chuckled away behind him as the four champions in tandem crossed the antehall towards what – arbitrarily or not – had been declared their side of the door. When finally the two groups of four were gathered at either side of the wide entrance, the only thing left to do was wait for the moment to arrive.

From inside the hall the sound of a hundred different voices blending into an oddly disembodied medley of noise wafted out into the foyer and reached the curious ears of the awaited few. No particular utterance could possibly be discerned from that one strange tongue of many, yet if there was one thing it still spoke of unmistakably, it was excitement.

"All this waiting business was a lot less stressful at the Quidditch world cup," Viktor muttered mostly to himself yet loudly enough to be overheard by the three around him, which he in turn realized only when he noticed the three pairs of eyes giving him strikingly similar looks of doubt.

"You're more nervous prior to a school dance than you were at the Quidditch world cup?" Cedric aptly voiced their collective incredulity.

Viktor stared back at them and for a second mirrored their bemusement. "I am not so bad at Quidditch," was all he said, and after a moment's contemplation a point well made was conceded with shrugs of shoulders and heads nodding.

Harry's eyes then wandered off quite of their own accord and somehow found their way over towards the other group of four, three of which they barely came to rest on at all, for only one of them stood out to him, commanded his eye and ensnared his mind, which was all the more impressive considering he could see little more of her than her backside. Though, admittedly, that had a captivating quality all of its own.

It was not that she was excluded from the group by anyone's intent, or that she was deliberately distancing herself from the others, and she stood little more than a step away from them, and yet in her very own way she remained an entity of her own. While Roger, as Cedric had just pointed out with a humorous scoff, was chatting up the two girls facing him, Hermione seemed deeply immersed in her own private thoughts, which Harry could not help but suspect revolved around every single step of their choreography, every twist and turn and change of stance.

The rehearsal the night before had gone pretty well, or so he thought, but eventually they had made that one small mistake in a lateral movement that had made them bump into Fleur and Roger. Everybody had had a good laugh about it and simply repeated the sequence one more time, and Cedric had voted to include the graceful blunder in the official routine, but Harry had no doubt that Hermione's mind was hung up on exactly that one misstep instead of the hundreds of perfect ones. Not that Hermione herself would deem them perfect, of course. There was, after all, always room for improvement.

"Quite a magnificent sight, _non?"_

Startled, Harry swiveled about, then awkwardly scratched the back of his head when he found Fleur standing right next to him, her eyes directed straight at that from which Harry had just torn away his own.

"I wasn't ogling!" he claimed with a twinge of panic. "I was just–just–"

"Ogling," Fleur finished for him, smiling. "I like the sound of that. Funny little word."

Harry did not know what to reply to that. He had always thought _ratatouille_ to be a rather funny little word, but that seemed hardly relevant at the moment.

"I think you should do some more ogling," Fleur told him, her smile now tucked away in a corner of her mouth in almost mischievous a fashion. "Especially when she's aware of it."

Harry looked a tad addled at that. That really went against everything he had ever heard about proper conduct. "Are you sure that's an advisable course of action?"

"Well, I'm naturally not telling you to stare at her chest all night long," Fleur set out to clarify, "but–"

The sudden sound of trumpets filled the air, playing a short, rising flourish that Harry remembered hearing prior to the first task. It made Fleur stop short mid-sentence and, like everybody else, prick up her ears.

"Showtime," Cedric reasonably inferred when the music literally ended on a high note, clapping his hands together.

Next to him, Viktor Krum nervously straightened out the sleeves of his suit.

Next to him, Harry felt too nervous to even think about doing anything.

Next to him, Fleur looked like she was about to take a leisurely stroll through a park on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Unfazed, that is.

"How many balls have you been to before?" Harry felt inclined to ask her.

She looked amused. "Why would I keep count of that?"

He gave a sort of alibi nod.

A voice then rose from inside the Great Hall, quickly hushing every last whisper passing through the eager crowd. It was the young herald Professor McGonagall had brought to their attention earlier, and Harry, stretching his neck a little, could just see him standing next to the entrance on the opposite side within the Great Hall. His stiff posture alone exuded importance as much as his vibrant garb spoke of tradition.

"Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed witches and wizards, the Triwizard champions!" he solemnly announced, the cadence and inflection of his voice imbued with pathos. "From Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, champion Fleur Isabelle Delacour and her companion Roger Davies of House Ravenclaw."

Smiling, the two met right in the center of the arched opening, and with her arm lightly laced through his stepped through it and into a hall that for a couple of seconds seemed to hold its collective breath. Although Harry did not believe there was anything going on between the two beyond the night's occasion, he could not help but observe that they made quite the couple in strictly visual terms.

Viktor, meanwhile, grumbled something in his native tongue. It did not sound very encouraging. As if to make up for it, Cedric gave him a parting pat on the shoulder and then even squeezed it a bit for some extra solidarity.

"From Durmstrang Institute," the herald continued, his steady voice effortlessly rising above the ongoing applause and the oohs and aahs mixed into it, "Viktor Krum and his companion Céleste Justine Baudelaire from Beauxbatons."

Viktor's smile did not come quite as naturally as his predecessor's had, but there was an attempt. Céleste, for her part, looked all routine, which really made Harry wonder whether Beauxbatons merely masqueraded as an academy of magic and in actuality was all about the modeling and the dancing and the consumption of ratatouille. What _was_ ratatouille, anyway?

Cedric then stepped forth and with a wink at a soon to be forsaken Harry said, "See you in a minute."

"From Hogwarts School of Witchraft and Wizardry," the announcer's voice consequently introduced the third couple, "champion Cedric Diggory of House Hufflepuff and his companion Cho Chang of House Ravenclaw."

And it was at this point in time when Harry, standing all by himself now with no more dearly required buffer between him and the hour of doom, lost his mind. He wasn't ready! Too quickly they had gone through three couples! Why weren't there any more? He couldn't do this! He wasn't ready! He needed more time! He wasn't even supposed to be there, for crying out loud! That stupid goblet was to blame! Also, he wasn't ready! There was simply no way–

"From Hogwarts School of Witchraft and Wizardry..."

 _No! Just no!_

"... champion Harry James Potter..."

 _I should have stayed in my cupboard under the stairs!_

"... and his companion Hermione Jane Granger of House Gryffindor."

 _Well, I kind of like the sound of that, actually..._

And already his body was somehow set in motion even while his brain still complained that it had issued no such order, yet something else commanded him beside the simple inescapability of it all. It was the sight of Hermione coming to meet him half-way, shy and yet assured, so deeply familiar and yet unfathomably different. So muddled were all his senses, so entirely taken by her very being, that he failed to consciously take note of the crowd's reaction when Hermione's name was called out, with several expressions of surprise and a billowing susurrus of avid speculation going around the tables.

Readily he offered her his arm with his features breaking into a smile that was utterly irrepressible, and she took it with just about the same sensation lighting a twinkling fire in her eyes.

"Is it silly that I feel like this is the greatest challenge I've ever faced?"

Hermione gave a half-suppressed chortle. "A little," she said. "But then again, I think I feel exactly the same way."

Harry inhaled deeply. "Shall we face it together then, silly or not?"

"Naturally," she answered, if possible smiling even brighter. "As always."

And so indeed they crossed the threshold and side by side stepped into the light of the Great Hall that opened up before them seemingly larger than it had ever been, a hundred curious pairs of eyes within an instant riveted to naught but them.

~•~

He had not yet had the time to properly process any of it, was, in actuality, still very much in the middle of the whole experience, but already he felt that it had not only been far less disastrous than he had originally feared it would be, but truthfully and quite to the contrary rather marvelous all around.

The ceremonial introductory dance had gone so well-nigh perfectly it had eventually moved Professor McGonagall to tears. Only once had Harry's left foot been on the verge of going in the wrong direction, but when it had collided with Hermione's counterpart she had inconspicuously guided him back onto the proper path. Even the most difficult part of the routine, the quick switching of the pairs in a sort of motion that looked a bit like the Rutherford model of the atom and was just about as confusing as the real thing, they all had executed flawlessly. When during the finale the four boys had twirled the four girls round the dance floor three times over, from up above the young women's vibrant dresses would have looked like flowers in bloom in a crystalline field of ice.

Indeed, the hall itself truly was a sight to remember, in Harry's eyes only surpassed in its mesmerizing splendor by a single figure that occupied it with him – a fact that he was too embarrassed to inform her of, naturally. Separated by an aisle where the floor seemed to be a little river flowing gently underneath a layer of translucent ice from the entrance at one end to the dance floor at the other end of the hall, there were a dozen large round tables of white marble accommodating precisely one hundred and forty-four guests. The dance floor itself had the appearance of a lake all frozen over in the middle of a clearing deep in winter's grasp, with Hagrid's six enormous and lavishly snow-coated trees framing it in the background and giving the setting as a whole the semblance of a life-sized diorama of some long forgotten Christmas dream come true.

Luckily the frostily glistening ground was not made to possess the physical properties of that which it visually represented. And despite the fact that it very much seemed to be snowing all night long throughout the hall as countless frisky flakes came falling, drifting, tumbling from a star-speckled night sky into which the stone walls of the hall seemed to reach and gradually vanish with no ceiling to be discerned atop, it was never actually cold and not a single wayward snowflake ever touched a solid surface, be it twig of tree or strand of hair. They simply ceased to be in mid-air, if ever they had truly been at all.

And the light, that pure white light seemed to be everywhere. There were tremendous, sparkling crystal chandeliers floating freely above each of the twelve round tables, and their candles burned brightly in the likeness of the glinting stars above, and yet the true source of the light could never quite be placed. The very air seemed to be imbued with it, playing around the human (and half-giant) bodies and casting soft shadows that unfolded in all directions on the shimmering surface of the make-believe lake; shadows that at times could even be caught dancing a little dance of their own before hurriedly flitting back into their proper places.

It was, in its magnificent entirety, quintessentially magical.

The same could be said for many of the dancing couples, of course, and none of them more so than one Rubeus Hagrid and the sole recipient of his besotted attention, Madame Olympe Maxime, between them fielding an average height that Muggles only know from the tallest of professional basketball players and an average weight that Madame Maxime would not at all have cared to hear about.

Headmaster Dumbledore had been his most yeasty self, first waltzing expertly with Minerva McGonagall and then taking Pomona Sprout for a surprisingly spunky spin. His inner fountain of youth only appeared to find itself depleted after his pas de deux with Madame Maxime, which also happened to be quite the tête-à-tête, and as a direct result of the latter it was the soreness in his neck rather than the exhaustion of his lower appendages that made him seek out the seating accommodations and try a few of the various offered refreshments, ranging from caviar to lemon drops.

Some of the many attendees had not been quite as enthusiastic about the whole affair as others, however, with Igor Karkaroff being the first to retire after grimly fulfilling his traditional duty of briefly dancing with representatives of both the hosting school as well as the second visiting school. Severus Snape had worn the desire to poison someone — possibly himself — rather plainly on his face throughout most of the celebratory night, but Septima Vector at least had not been deterred by any of that, and for a brief moment an especially attentive observer might even have ventured to infer that the unlikely professorial pair looked like it was having something at least distantly related to fun out there on the dance floor. Meanwhile, Argus Filch had limited himself to tenderly swaying about with Mrs. Norris, herself a cat.

Eventually, after an hour or so, and with most of the professors and ministry guests taking their leave peu à peu, the evening had progressed from the altogether formal part of the ceremony, aptly accompanied by the timeless masterpieces of extraordinarily un-magically talented Muggles such as Johann Strauss II and Dmitri Shostakovich, to the more modern and boisterous part, featuring a frenetic live performance of the _Weird Sisters,_ obviously in no way inferior in their musical prowess to aforementioned composers. According to wizarding folk under the age of seventeen, anyway.

And now, after quite a bit of dancing and some contractually required posing for the press, one Harry James Potter was sitting in his seat at one of the tables nearest to the deceptively real lake, absently — and just a tad wearily — watching the merry young crowd flailing their limbs into all directions while uninhibitedly singing, hooting, bawling along as the markedly male _Sisters_ played some of their most famous hits that incidentally less than 0.01% of the human world population actually were aware of.

Harry watched as Cedric, Cho, Roger, Fleur and her little sister Gabrielle danced together in a merry roundelay, with Céleste pulling unwilling Viktor towards the group to join them, the lot of them laughing and shouting happily as drums and bagpipes feverishly spurred them ever on and on. It did not fail to bring a smile to Harry's tired face, and although he could not help but notice how Fleur indeed managed to stand out in some impalpable way of her own even where others should get lost in the shuffle like a grain of sand on the beach, he may have been one of only a small number of boys that night who could look at her and still think of somebody else. And just as that thought filled his mind, Fleur and Cedric looked over to him and waved, beckoning him to come join them, and Harry made a very elaborate sort of sign with his hands that hopefully communicated something along the lines of, ' _Wait a minute or ten, but I can't promise anything.'_

Where indeed was Hermione? Already he had not seen her for a couple of minutes. Not since he had kissed her hand in parting when his favorite associate of all, Rita Skeeter, had asked for a quick _off-the-record_ chat with him. And now she was simply vanished from sight. He got up from his chair and as his gaze quickly swept the whole hall, now inconveniently darkened in favor of a typical rock concert atmosphere, he briefly saw Ron making – likely for the eighth time that night – his way back from the buffet to the dance floor with yet another snack in his hands. Harry hardly had the presence of mind to properly question why he, unlike most guys who had preferred to get rid of constraining tailcoats and ties for the second half of the night, was loosely wearing half a dozen of the latter around his neck in the same number of different colors.

Thus Harry turned his back on the wild frenzy of the party and purposefully headed straight for the exit, his eyes still scouring tables left and right as he did so. Out in the antehall three conversing students, which turned out to be Fred, George and one that Harry did not recognize, noticed him looking around, paused briefly and then collectively pointed him towards the door that led out into the inner courtyard. A bit baffled by their apparent mind-reading abilities, he managed something of an appreciative smile and then went ahead and followed their directions.

Stepping outside without so much as a second thought, the cold hit him almost as hard as a full-fledged freezing spell, and he was immediately thankful that he had not yet surrendered his coat. After this initial shock his eyes needed but a moment to focus on the only thing in the courtyard that caught his attention as much as it captured the moonlight. A lonely, unmistakably female figure sat there on a stone bench underneath the Everspring tree with her back turned towards him. The smooth skin of her shoulders almost seemed to be cast in shining silver, and the night-touched blue of her dress was like an isle of color in a sea of white.

Genuinely stunned by this unexpected sight and for a moment feeling almost as if he had stepped right into the most beautiful moving painting he had ever seen, it took him a moment to shake himself back into clarity and step onward to approach the one he had been looking for. He also tripped on his first step because the defining part of his tailcoat was stuck in the door, and cussing under his breath he let the inanimate object know what he thought of its insolence before moving on.

"Hermione?" he tentatively spoke up even before the soft crunching noise of his footsteps on snow-covered ground would eventually have given him away. He saw her tense up at the unexpected sound of his voice, felt it almost, and with a quickened stride closed the remaining gap between them. "What are you doing out here? It's freezing!"

Only briefly her head swirled around before she averted it once more, facing him barely long enough for him to notice how her cheeks caught the bluish light of a starlit winter night in two thin telltale lines.

"Are you crying?" he immediately asked in worry as he sat down next to her, his mind too focused on her to consciously question why the stone bench was not just the only surface in the courtyard, along with the immediate area surrounding it, that was free of snow but also remarkably and unnaturally warm. It was downright magical.

Hastily Hermione wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. "No, I'm not," she answered, a faint yet sufficiently traitorous remnant of a sniffle in her voice. "Technically, I'm all done."

Harry failed to fully suppress a brief flicker of a smile on his lips in spite of the suspect situation. How could she be so cute when he was so concerned? He heaved a sigh, bridging a moment that was part patience and part hesitance, only for something else entirely to suddenly take precedence in his mind. He would not let some weird radiator-bench stand between him and the right thing to do, and so he stood up, slipped off his coat and gingerly put it over Hermione's shoulders before sitting back down again. Shyly and without looking him in the eye Hermione gave him a grateful smile, whispering a _thank you_ as she drew the coat closer around herself. He waited for a moment longer, indecisive as he listened with half an ear to the muffled noise and music reaching them from the Great Hall.

"What's going on?" he finally asked her, gently. "Has something happ—wait! Was it something I did or something I said? It was, wasn't it? I messed up, didn't I? As per habit I just went right ahead and totally rui—"

"No, Harry," Hermione interrupted him with soft-spoken emphasis, putting a reassuring hand on his knee. "You can stop that nonsense right now. It's nothing like that."

"It's not?"

She shook her head, a few loose ringlets of her hair dancing along with the motion. "Actually, one might even say it's the complete opposite."

His expression turned contemplative. "It's... something I _didn't_ say or do?"

With a chuckle she once again answered in the negative, then, with the sound of her amusement subsiding, ended up looking at him for an inadvertent moment of vaguely meaningful silence. In little more than a whisper she pensively told him, "It's that everything you said and did was... perfect. Just perfect."

By all rights her answer should have been a great relief to him, yet nevertheless he gulped. "It was?"

She nodded, a glimmer in her eyes. She was definitely looking at him now.

"Maybe I'm missing the obvious here," he said quite slowly, "but if that's the case then where's the reason for tears in any of of it?"

"They weren't sad tears," she elucidated. "Nor angry ones, for that matter. In fact, they weren't very emotional at all, if that makes any sense."

If indeed it did make any sense, very little of it registered on Harry's face. "Just how many different kinds of tears are there, exactly?"

"Loads," she answered with the twitch of a smile at the corners of her mouth. "These ones were very physical in nature, you know? Just my body's way of depressurizing, if you will."

He furrowed his brow. "Why were you under so much pressure?" At that a cheeky smirk suddenly replaced the general puzzlement on his face. "You're aware our dancing performance will not be graded, right?"

Hermione glowered at him even as her lips had little choice but to mirror his brazenly amused counterparts. "At the risk of sounding like a broken record here," she then set out to explain more seriously, "for I vaguely remember stating something very much like this just about a week ago, but, as it has become quite clear to me over the course of the day, I must have been young and inexperienced at the time and obviously could not have had any idea what I was talking about when I claimed to be overwhelmed. In sage hindsight I can safely say that, what at the very most I may have been, is _whelmed._ For today... only today am I truly, thoroughly and wholly _over_ -whelmed."

Harry quietly waited for her to go on, for he could tell that she would just by the way she briefly nibbled on her lower lip while taking a deep breath.

"I just can't believe it, you see?" his expectations were met. "No matter how hard I try. Can't wrap my head around it. All these sensations, this whole experience... that quite frankly made me feel like a flipping Disney princess... down to this lovely dress and these fancy shoes, my ridiculous hair and these sparkling earrings, and all these pretty things which nobody would ever associate with Hermione Granger, perhaps least of all herself. The wonderful music and the dancing and this entire surreal night..." She paused, hesitated. "And you." Her eyes boldly locked with his then, as an unsteady breath brushed over her trembling lips, on the exhalation of which she went on to say, "Mostly you. Ninety-nine percent you. Oh, forget all else! How can this possibly be real? Just this. Just you and me. I'm still waiting to suddenly wake up and realize that none of it ever happened, and never before have I been this giddy with excitement and this numb with fear at the same time."

He looked at her intently, and resurfacing worry joined the multitude of emotions already commingled on his features. His following question was simple, yet poignant. "Fear?"

Her whole demeanor was fraught with uncertainty as her gaze returned to her lightly folded hands in her lap. "Of waking up," she answered meekly.

Harry in thoughtful silence watched her for a little while; watched her breathing, blinking, being. "You _are_ awake, Hermione," he spoke at last, and the sound of his voice alone, kind and deeply caring as it was, compelled her to look back at him. "We both are wide awake."

And for a second, and then another, they simply looked at each other, gazed into one another, past their fears and past all fading veils of doubt, finding within something more substantial and truer than all dreams. And it was there and then, in that moment, in those two eyes of emerald green that looked at nothing else but her and tenderly laid bare the very core of her innermost being, that she at last saw clearly her own beauteous self. And though it played but a small part in her blossoming affection for him and could never be its root or essence, it was nevertheless a gift immeasurably treasured.

And then he kissed her. The faintest gasp escaped her parting lips at the first soft touch of his, and with it dissipated whatever transient fear may yet have lingered within her, and touching, tasting truth itself, in its place there sprang into being the vertiginous certainty of the realness of it all.

When Harry at last leaned back ever so slightly he found that Hermione's eyes were still closed, and the smallest yet most pleasant kind of smile tickled a corner of his mouth as he quietly watched the flushed features of his favorite face in the world. Slowly, so far from all the desperate haste of man, her eyes opened up as well, and when they focused on Harry she smiled right back at him. They remained like that as disregarded seconds ticked on by, before Hermione suddenly narrowed her eyes.

"Seriously, though," she then said. "David Copperfield?"

He laughed. "That one's gonna stick for a while, isn't it?"

"I just can't figure out why you would come up with that particular name in a situation like that."

"Well, because he's just about the closest thing Muggles have to a wizard. Obviously."

"What?" she voiced her confusion a moment before understanding set in. "Oh, _that_ David Copperfield! This whole time I thought you were referring to the eponymous protagonist of the Charles Dickens novel!"

Harry did a funny sort of thing with his mouth as his eyes wandered in a half-circle. "That... would've been the more sophisticated explanation."

Hermione smiled with unconcealed affection. "Yours really has the more sensible context, though."

"Anyway," he then said, "why is this bench so freakishly warm?"

She laughed at the blatant diversion. "Because I cast a heating charm on it, of course," she pointed out the obvious. "You know, one of these days you could start paying attention in class. You might even notice that we're at a school that teaches magic."

He made a face at her as she giggled. "Why do you even have your wand with you tonight?"

"I always do," she answered with a shrug. "Well, except that one time last week when I had to borrow yours. But that was kind of an off day for me. Usually I have it on me."

"Where did you keep it this whole time?" he inquired further, even looking around as if in search for some secret hiding spot out there underneath the tree.

"Had it tied to my thigh."

His eyebrows shot up. "That... that's kind of sexy."

Her mouth broke into a wide, delighted grin. "Not necessarily what I was going for, but I'll take it."

"Why d'you always carry it with you, though?"

"Harry, are you at all aware how, out of the three years we've so far completed at this place, there wasn't a single one in which we didn't in some way come uncomfortably close to dying?"

Harry stared at her blankly for a moment. "Well, I just assumed that's what school is like for everybody 'round here. Part of the Hogwarts experience, so to speak."

She shook her head even as an insistent smile undermined the severity of her disapproval. "And that is exactly why I take it upon myself to look after you, since you so flagrantly refuse to do it yourself."

"I honestly don't know what I would do without you, anyway," he told her, and the way he said it – playful, perhaps; sincere, indubitably – made her look down at her hands abashedly. "But," he was quick to continue, and as he did so he put his hands on his knees and rose from the bench, "I do know what I'd like to do _with_ you."

He extended his right hand, palm facing up, towards her, finally asking, "So... will you do me the honor, Miss Granger?"

Her eyes first fixated his hand, then wandered up the length of his arm to meet his expectant gaze. "The honor would be all mine, Mr. Potter," she replied with the appropriate amount of gravitas, took his hand and let herself be pulled to her feet. "We have to do this properly, though," she added, "and I'd really like to feel like a Disney princess for just a little while longer."

And already she was slipping out of the coat wrapped loosely around her shoulders and handing it back to him even as a shiver went through her as soon as the cool air once more assaulted her exposed skin.

"Won't you be cold like that?" he asked her promptly.

And coyly she replied, "I'll trust you to keep me warm yourself, then."

Smiling he put on his tailcoat, quickly straightened out his white shirt underneath and his periwinkle tie and then took a deep breath as he looked at her, and down the length of her body, suddenly finding himself at a bit of a loss. Evidently he had not fully thought this through, and this had certainly not been part of Professor McGonagall's dancing lessons. Fortunately, Hermione was almost quicker to pick up on his predicament than he himself was.

"For this kind of dance I'd say your hands would go to both sides of my waist," she told him, and almost not at all awkwardly he followed her instructions. "And mine would go around your neck, like this."

And just like that, to the mellow tune that came wafting over faintly from the Great Hall, they started dancing, which truthfully consisted mostly of shifting their weight from one foot to the other while only minimally changing their positions, thus turning in a circle that would likely take them forever to complete. At variance with the slow rhythm of the music and the calm motion of their bodies, their eager young hearts were racing within their chests, incited all anew by their as yet so unfamiliar closeness.

Even though initially there had still been some space left between them, it took that little gap less than a minute to completely – and quite inexplicably so – vanish. Indeed, whether it had been Harry's hands, which had somehow found their way to the small of her back, that continuously and ever so slightly had pushed her towards him, or instead Hermione's intertwined counterparts at the back of Harry's neck which had pulled him ever closer, or if perhaps it had been both these things in equal parts or some more enigmatic force than either, that was impossible to say.

But once their bodies were flush against one another and each of them slowly wrapped their arms around the other, everything but the existence of the two of them faded into blessed irrelevance. Surrounded by winter's cold, in their embrace there was only warmth. Their dance was but a gentle swaying of two bodies unified in motion, and the music became little more than some indefinable part of the soothing susurration of the undying leaves of the Everspring tree, its sprawling branches like a roof above them, shielding them from harsher winds.

Their eyes broke contact only to drink in every little detail of the face so near before them, but never for long. Tentatively the tips of their noses touched, and while at first it was barely more than a playful little nudge accompanied by the faintest of smiles, they quickly met again to explore each other's shape more thoroughly. Hermione was the first to close her eyes, but after admiring the wondrous sight in front of him for just a moment longer, Harry followed suit.

Their foreheads met, remained there for a while, moved slightly from side to side, until slowly, leisurely she proceeded to the side of his face, temple against temple, her silken cheeks brushing his in a circling sort of motion, him leaning into it and returning her caress in kind. The intoxicating fragrance of her skin and her hair filled his nose, his head, his lungs, until every last piece of him seemed to be suffused with every facet of her being. Like the rest of their bodies had found some intangible sense of synchronicity, their featherlight hearts too had eventually fallen into the same calm cadence, assured now of the undeniable rightness of everything they were, had always been and would yet become.

Eventually she turned her head to the side as it came to lightly rest against his shoulder, and with her nose she snuggled into his neck just below his chin. When a deep long sigh escaped her chest and he heard the hint of a blissful moan in there, he smiled quietly, sleepily and in consummate contentedness.

The year was 1994. 'Twas December, 'twas the season, and Harry and Hermione were entirely taken by each other.

"You know," Harry at some point said in a musing tone, "I think I could see myself growing rather fond of all this dancing business after all."

And with a smile of perfect peace spreading on her placid features Hermione softly breathed against the warm skin of his neck, "Me too."

 **~ The End ~**

* * *

 **Citations and sources and such**

 _Let us read and let us dance:_ The originator of this line, which Hermione quotes in her conversation with Fleur, is French thinker Voltaire, also not really known as François-Marie Arouet.

* * *

 **Last but not least**

To all readers, reviewers, helpful assistants and favoriters (that's a word now): thank you. It's great to see some of you coming back even after I've taken a year or two to get anything done around here, and any newfound reader is naturally no less welcome. Glad to have you all, really. Well, almost all of you. For the most part, anyway. Some of you, definitely.

Ahem.

Until next time!


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